Professional Documents
Culture Documents
G R O U N D S for D I F F E R E N C E
ROGERS BRUBAKER
Cambridge, Massachusetts
London, England
2015
Copyright © 2015 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
First printing
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction 1
Notes 157
References 181
Index 213
Acknowledgments
essentialist folk understandings of identity; yet they can also serve to un-
dermine notions of “pure” or sharply bounded groups, highlighting in-
stead the inextricable mixedness of all human populations and the genetic
uniqueness of every individual. Chapter 2 explores the complex and am-
bivalent implications of the “return of biology” for the theory and practice
of ethnicity, race, and nationhood. It surveys developments in biomedicine,
forensics, genetic genealogy, and identity politics, and it concludes by out-
lining a constructivist response to the new objectivist and naturalist ac-
counts of race and ethnicity.
The third undertheorized context for the contemporary politics of dif-
ference is the return of the sacred. The idea of secularization has figured
centrally in accounts of modernity, and it has been the primary organizing
paradigm of the sociology of religion. Developments of recent decades—
the resurgence of political Islam, the spectacular global spread of Pente-
costalism, and the renewed vitality of Christian, Jewish, Hindu, and Mus-
lim fundamentalisms—have made simplistic versions of secularization theory
ripe for criticism. Some theorists have spoken of “desecularization” (Berger
1999) or of “post-secular society” (Habermas 2008). But as other leading
sociologists of religion have argued (Casanova 1994; Gorski and Altinordu
2008), secularization theory is more complex, interesting, and robust than
many critics suggest.
Secularization has been understood in different ways by different theo-
rists, but it generally designates one or more of three distinct processes: the
differentiation of religion from other spheres of social life; the decline of
religious belief or practice; or the privatization of religion. As José Casa-
nova (1994) has argued, there is strong evidence for differentiation but
only weak evidence (outside Europe) for decline. About the privatization
thesis, the evidence is interestingly mixed. Religion (or its close cousin,
spirituality) has become for many (especially but not exclusively in the West)
an increasingly individual, subjective, and private matter—an affair of the
heart, with little relevance for the public square. Yet recent decades have
witnessed a striking resurgence of what Casanova calls “public religion.”
Against the expectations of the secularization theory of a generation ago,
religion has refused to remain safely cantoned within a depoliticized private
realm; it has insisted on entering the public sphere and making claims
about the organization of public life.
The resurgence of public religion has major implications for how we
understand diversity, multiculturalism, and the politics of difference. That
societies worldwide are becoming more diverse and pluralistic is a truism,
but how they are becoming more diverse is seldom examined. Discussions
of diversity—academic debates as well as broader public discussions—often
I n t ro du c t i on 5
Citizenship
I begin with citizenship because it contributes to the production and re-
production of inequality in particularly clear, straightforward, analytically
tractable, profound, pervasive, and yet inadequately theorized ways.
Students of inequality have paid little attention to citizenship, while stu-
dents of citizenship long paid little attention to inequality. The influential
line of work inaugurated by T. H. Marshall (1950), long dominant in the
sociology of citizenship, highlighted the egalitarian dynamics of citizen-
ship, seen as counteracting the inequality-generating logic of capitalism. In
recent decades, to be sure, the duality of citizenship—internally inclusive
but externally exclusive—has been widely recognized, and citizenship has
been analyzed as an “instrument and object of social closure” (Brubaker
1992: chapter 1). Yet the exclusionary workings of citizenship have been
studied in severely truncated perspective. The visible workings of citizen-
ship (and related categories) within the territory of the state are well stud-
ied, but the more profound and consequential invisible workings of citi-
zenship outside the territory of the state have been neglected.
In all modern states, conceived as the states of and for their citizens, citi-
zenship and related categories of membership (like permanent resident sta-
tus) function transparently as instruments of social closure. In the United
States today, this is most salient at the boundary between citizens and per-
manent residents on the one hand and the roughly 11 million undocumented
immigrants on the other, who are excluded from a vast range of rights, ben-
efits, and opportunities, above all, the right to work and the right to secure
residence in the territory.9
On a global scale, however, the visible exclusion of tens of millions of
undocumented residents from a range of benefits within the territories of
prosperous and peaceful states is dwarfed by the invisible exclusion of bil-
lions of noncitizens from the territories of such states. The categorical dis-
tinction between citizens and foreigners is not only built into the basic
structure of the modern state; it is built into the basic structure of the
modern state system—a system of bounded and exclusive citizenries,
matched with bounded and exclusive territorial polities. By assigning ev-
ery person at birth, in principle, to one and only one territorial state, the
institution of citizenship is central to the fundamentally segmentary orga-
nization of the state system (Joppke 2003: 441).10 The segmentary logic of
citizenship binds the vast majority of the world’s population to the state to
20 Di f f e r e n c e a n d I n e q ual ity
which they have been assigned by the accident of birth. Given the immense
economic, political, demographic, health, and environmental disparities
among states, this segmentary system of forced immobility contributes de-
cisively to perpetuating vast global inequalities in life chances.
“Forced immobility” might seem an odd or even perverse expression
given the magnitude of international migration flows. Yet only about 3
percent of the world’s people live outside the country of their birth, and
fewer than half of these represent south-north migrants (International
Organization for Migration 2013: 55). This amounts to a very large number
in absolute terms, estimated at between 75 and 95 million in 2010, but it
remains a small number in relation to the many hundreds of millions of
people who would seek work, welfare, or security in prosperous and
peaceful countries if they were free to do so, yet who can be routinely,
legitimately, and invisibly excluded, simply by virtue of their citizenship
(Brubaker 1992: ix).11
There is a circular quality to citizenship-based territorial closure. Only
citizens enjoy free access to the territory, yet only (legal) residents have ac-
cess to citizenship. This circularity permits nation-states to remain rela-
tively closed and self-perpetuating communities, open only at the margins
to the exogenous recruitment of new members (Brubaker 1992: 34).
The routine territorial excludability of noncitizens permits citizens of
prosperous and peaceful countries to reserve (largely) for themselves a wide
range of economic, political, social, and cultural goods, opportunities, and
freedoms, not to mention such basic goods as relatively clean air and water,
a functioning public health infrastructure, and public order and security.
In Tilly’s terminology, this amounts to opportunity hoarding on a colossal
scale. Yet the contribution of citizenship to global inequality has been largely
untheorized until recently—including by Tilly himself, who (like others)
considers only the within-state workings of citizenship.12 And apart from
a few academic discussions, it remains legally, politically, and morally largely
unchallenged. Those excluded from the territory—unlike those excluded
within the territory of a liberal democratic state—have neither the legal
standing nor the political and organizational resources to challenge their
exclusion.13 And unlike legally codified and administratively enforced ex-
clusion on the basis of gender, race, or religion, exclusion on the basis of
citizenship—an ascribed status like the others—continues to be taken for
granted as natural and understood as morally and politically legitimate
(Pritchett 2006: 77–92).
Citizenship-based territorial closure did not produce the vast between-
country inequalities, but it does serve to perpetuate them. It does so by
locking (most) people into the countries to which they were assigned at
D i f f e r e n c e a n d I n e q ual ity 21
Gender
Like citizenship-based categorical inequality, gender-based categorical ine-
quality can work through the medium of law (or, more broadly, formal
rules). The multiple legal disabilities long suffered by women are well
known. In the United States, for example, married women could not own
property or exercise independent legal agency until the second half of the
nineteenth century. Women were formally barred from a range of occupa-
tions, and they were not permitted to vote, hold elective office, or serve on
juries. Over the course of the past century and a half, however, the legal
disabilities have been abolished, and the law now serves to protect and
promote women’s rights in a variety of domains. In contemporary liberal
democratic contexts, gender has ceased to work as a legally or otherwise
formally codified basis of exclusion.16
The elimination of formal gender-based inequalities, of course, has left
wide-ranging substantive inequalities in place, and these (unlike citizenship-
based inequalities) have been the subject of a very large literature. I limit
myself here—as in the subsequent discussion of ethnicity—to some highly
selective observations, with empirical evidence drawn from the United
States, in an effort to highlight the different ways in which major catego-
ries of difference are implicated in the production and reproduction of
inequality.
In my discussion of citizenship, I highlighted the segmentary organiza-
tion of the nation-state system. Ethnicity too is sometimes organized in
segmentary fashion, as a set of relatively self-enclosed and endogenously
self-reproducing communities. (This is characteristic of “thick” forms of
ethnicity, marked by high degrees of “institutional completeness.”) The so-
cial organization of gender is radically different. Men and women do not
constitute self-enclosed, self-sufficient, self-reproducing communities.17
They are profoundly interdependent and closely connected with one an-
other as parents, partners, friends, lovers, neighbors, colleagues, and kin
(Tilly 1998: 240–241; Ridgeway 2011: 46). This complicates the analysis
of gender inequality, since men and women form supra-individual units of
procreation, socialization, labor, consumption, and identification.18
The interdependence of men and women and the accompanying ideolo-
gies of essential difference and complementarity are powerfully concretized
in the profoundly gendered division of labor in heterosexual households.
The division of household labor and child care has changed substantially
in recent decades in the United States, but women still spend about twice
as many hours on both housework and child care as men do (Bianchi et al.
2006: 62–67, 116–117). This is both a crucial form of inequality in its
D i f f e r e n c e a n d I n e q ual ity 23
Ethnicity
Ethnicity—which I interpret broadly to include race as well as ethnicity-
like forms of religion25—is implicated in the production and reproduction
of inequality in some ways that are analogous to the workings of gender.
But in other respects the inequality-generating processes and mechanisms
are quite different. To bring these differences into focus, I begin with a
stylized and deliberately oversimplified comparison of the processes un-
derlying structures of gender and racial (specifically black-white) inequality
in the United States. I then broaden the discussion to highlight other ways
in which ethnicity, race, and ethnicity-like forms of religion are drawn into
processes and structures of categorical inequality.
Like gender inequality, racial inequality was long legally mandated and
enforced. Quite apart from legal support for slavery, free blacks in north-
ern as well as southern states suffered a variety of legal disabilities before
the Civil War (Hiers 2013: chapter 2). They were barred in most northern
states from voting and in some from testifying against whites, holding real
estate or even settling in the territory. These state-level provisions were
supplemented by exclusionary municipal ordinances. And while legal ex-
clusions were dismantled in the postbellum North, a comprehensive system
of legally mandated segregation was instituted in the post-Reconstruction
South, where it endured for three quarters of a century.
These formal legal exclusions, like those based on gender, have been
fully abolished. But as in the case of gender—only to a greater extent—the
elimination of formal inequalities has left massive substantive inequalities
in place. Some of these, and the processes that generate them, are analo-
gous to those in the domain of gender. Racial earnings differentials, for
example, have been studied in the same way as gender earnings differen-
tials: through individualist approaches that focus on human capital differ-
ences or employer discrimination and through structural approaches that
focus on labor market characteristics such as occupational segregation
and the devaluation of jobs dominated by women and minorities. Racial
and gender discrimination have also been studied in similar ways: through
cognitively oriented research aimed at uncovering the properties stereo-
typically associated, consciously or unconsciously, with social categories;
through attempts to estimate discrimination indirectly as the unexplained
residual that remains after controlling for other explanatory factors; and,
increasingly, through efforts to measure discriminatory behavior directly
through experimental audit studies.
The analogies might seem to go deeper. Four massive and deeply institu-
tionalized facts profoundly shape gender inequality: sex categorization as
D i f f e r e n c e a n d I n e q ual ity 29
General Processes
I have argued in the preceding sections, contra Tilly, that citizenship, gen-
der, and ethnicity are implicated in very different ways in the production
and reproduction of inequality. Having analyzed these differing forms of
difference, I return now to a more general level of analysis. I identify three
general processes—alternatives, in a sense, to Tilly’s proposed general
mechanisms of exploitation and opportunity hoarding—by which catego-
ries of difference generate and sustain inequality. I consider first the alloca-
tion of persons to positions; next the social production of persons with
36 Di f f e r e n c e a n d I n e q ual ity
shrinking the gap in rewards between more and less desirable positions.
This could be done, for example, by raising the minimum wage, strength-
ening labor unions, or instituting more progressive taxation of income.
Formally, these measures are difference-blind, concerned only with catego-
ries of positions; substantively, however, they would reduce inequalities
between categories of persons.
This raises the questions of how rewards get assigned to positions, how
particular degrees and forms of inequality get built into structures of posi-
tions, and how patterns of positional inequality change over time. These
large and complex questions, which engage broad macroeconomic debates
about technology and labor market structure as well as sociological de-
bates about positional inequality, are beyond the scope of this chapter. But
one issue requires brief discussion here: How do categories of difference
figure in the structuring of positions? More specifically: In what ways, and
to what degree, is the structure of positions—especially the assignment of
different rewards to different positions—affected by the categorical identi-
ties of their incumbents?
According to the devaluation hypothesis, female- and minority-dominated
jobs suffer a wage penalty, net of skills, experience, onerousness, and other
factors that affect pay levels (England et al. 1988; Tomaskovic-Devey
1993; Petersen and Morgan 1995). The hypothesis remains controversial
(on gender, see Tam 1997, 2000; England et al. 2000). But it illustrates an
important general mechanism through which the categorical composition
of incumbents can affect the rewards assigned to a position or, more ab-
stractly, the “quality” or “value” of a position.
One can see this by broadening the conception of “position” beyond
jobs to include neighborhoods as positions in residential space, schools as
positions in educational space, and class positions. The literature on racial
residential segregation, discussed earlier, makes clear that the categorical
composition of a neighborhood’s residents can affect the services provided
to the neighborhood, the willingness to invest in the neighborhood, and
the image or discursive representation of the neighborhood, generating in
some cases a mutually reinforcing nexus of confinement, neglect, aban-
donment, and territorial stigmatization (Wacquant 2008). A similar point
can be made about the categorical composition of public schools or other
public institutions. And the changing racial, ethnic, or religious composi-
tion of the working poor and subproletarian population, who can easily
be represented as “them” rather than “us,” may have contributed to dimin-
ishing support for redistributive policies in contemporary liberal demo-
cratic settings (Larsen 2011). In other contexts, the ethnoracial or ethnore-
ligious composition of economically privileged commercial or landowning
D i f f e r e n c e a n d I n e q ual ity 41
Conclusion
less honor, respect, and esteem simply by virtue of their category member-
ship, again independently of the positions they occupy.47
The categorically unequal distribution of honor, respect, and esteem is
in the first instance a form of symbolic inequality, that is, of inequality in
the distribution of symbolic goods. But such inequality is not merely sym-
bolic. Insofar as it operates through the internalization of dominant self-
devaluing schemes of classification and appraisal, it has material effects. In
this way, the social distribution of honor can be incorporated and embod-
ied in individual persons: in bodily hexis, ingrained ways of thinking and
feeling, and other somatic manifestations such as susceptibility to stress
and disease. These incorporated dispositional inequalities can contribute,
in turn, to positional inequalities by downwardly biasing self-assessments,
depressing occupational aspirations and educational investments, and
channeling members of subordinate categories away from the pursuit of
highly rewarded positions.48 There is thus a reciprocal relation between
positional inequality and the social distribution of honor. On the one hand,
positional inequality shapes the distribution of honor through the positive
and negative honor attached to positions. On the other hand, the directly
category-mediated distribution of honor shapes positional inequality through
the internalization of self-devaluing schemas of classification and appraisal
and the effects of this internalization on self-assessments, aspirations, dis-
positions, and behavior.
There is of course a risk in overstating the power of this circular dy-
namic of incorporation and externalization that leads from positions to
dispositions and then back to positions. It’s worth underscoring in this
connection that inequality in the distribution of honor exists quite apart
from such deep, self-devaluing incorporation. “Shallower” forms of sym-
bolic inequality—the unequal enjoyment of honor, respect, and esteem
that supervenes on membership in valued and devalued, marked and un-
marked categories—can be significant in their own right, even if members
of subordinate categories do not internalize dominant schemas of evalua-
tion and appraisal but instead challenge and contest those schemas through
strategies of transvaluation (Wimmer 2013: 57–58) or de-stigmatization
(Warren 1980; Lamont 2009; Lamont and Mizrachi 2012).
the course of the past two centuries, especially during the “minority rights
revolution” of the past half-century (Skrentny 2002). Legally mandated
categorical exclusions—as well as strongly categorical informal regimes of
exclusion—have been massively delegitimized; the law now mandates equal
treatment on the basis of sex, race, ethnicity, religion, and (to a lesser ex-
tent) sexual orientation, and it may even mandate preferential treatment
for members of previously excluded categories. This has undermined and
illegalized informal as well as formal regimes of categorical exclusion, in-
sofar as these go beyond a narrowly defined sphere of private association.
Although this development has proceeded furthest in the West, it is a global
phenomenon, evident in a series of striking changes at the level of the world
polity (Koenig 2008; Schmidt 2013).
There is one conspicuous yet seldom noticed exception to this precipi-
tous decline in legally mandated or sanctioned categorical inequality. While
discrimination on the basis of other ascribed identities has been massively
delegitimated, discrimination on the basis of citizenship has been largely
unchallenged. Countries—or more precisely, clusters of countries—can be
seen as positions in the global nation-state system, to which discontinuous
bundles of rewards and opportunities are attached; and access to these
positions is assigned on the basis of a categorical identity that is assigned
at birth. Citizenship is the great remaining bastion of strong categorical
inequality in the modern world; this inherited status continues to under-
write and legitimate immense structures of between-country inequality on
a global scale.
Other ascribed categories of difference continue, of course, to enter into
the production and reproduction of inequality in important ways that I
have sought to clarify in this chapter. But they do so, on the whole, in ways
that have become less strictly categorical. Categorical inequality in the weak,
statistical sense is ubiquitous; but categorical inequality in the strong, pro-
cessual sense—referring to the allocation of categorically distinct bundles
of rewards and opportunities on the basis of ascribed categorical identi-
ties—is increasingly vestigial in liberal democratic contexts.
A great strength of Tilly’s Durable Inequality is its sustained attention to
the categorical nature of inequality between clusters of organizational
positions. Yet Tilly does not consistently distinguish this kind of intra-
organizational categorical inequality from categorical inequality in the al-
location of persons to positions or in the social production of persons.
Categorical inequality among organizational positions and categorical in-
equality among persons have quite distinct causes and need not go hand in
hand. Strictly categorical inequality between clusters of positions is the
rule in contemporary large organizations; strictly categorical inequality in
46 Di f f e r e n c e a n d I n e q ual ity
ings of difference that opened up in the second half of the twentieth century.
On the terrain of biomedicine, genomics has come to be understood, at
least in the public eye, less as a postracial than a neoracial science.
Emblematic of the scientific rehabilitation of commonsense racial
categories—and contributing significantly to that rehabilitation—is the
work of leading genetic epidemiologist Neil Risch (Braun 2006). In a
widely discussed opinion piece in Genome Biology (Risch et al. 2002), Risch
directly challenged the claim—which had been endorsed, most recently, by
editorials in both the New England Journal of Medicine (Schwartz 2001)
and Nature Genetics (2001)—that race has no biological foundation. That
claim, Risch suggested, rested on political sensitivities, not on scientific
evidence. He argued that population genetic studies have validated tradi-
tional understandings of race, based on continental ancestry; that differ-
ences between continental races are not “merely cosmetic” but medically
significant; and that standard measures underestimate genetic differences
between races since rare disease-predisposing alleles, not captured in
standard measures, are more likely than common alleles to be specific to a
single race.
Risch claimed not only the mantle of scientific objectivity but also the
moral and political high ground. To ignore race in biomedical research would
not only be scientifically unwarranted; it would also be morally and politi-
cally problematic, hampering efforts to reduce health disparities between
races. This exemplifies the emergence of what Catherine Bliss has called an
“anti-racist racialism,” a “race-positive” yet politically progressive stance
among geneticists, as part and parcel of a broader political and cultural
shift from color-blind (and more generally difference-blind) liberalism to
an inclusive differentialism (Bliss 2012: 5, 15–17, 74ff; Fullwiley 2008).
For decades, political and moral sensibilities had delegitimized objectiv-
ist understandings of race; now—at least in the domain of biomedicine—
they could relegitimize such understandings. This antiracist racialism is of
course not uncontroversial, but it cannot be ignored.
The new objectivism and naturalism present a challenge to subjectivist
and constructivist accounts of race and ethnicity. The foundational asser-
tion of such accounts—that race is a social fact but a biological myth—can
no longer be supported by a straightforward appeal to the authority of
biology, as if that appeal could settle the matter. Though some biologists
continue to endorse this claim, others no longer hesitate to challenge it.
These challenges come not from the fringe, not from “ogre naturalists”
(Hacking 2005), not even necessarily from conservatives eager to deflect re-
sponsibility for racial inequality from social to natural causes. The assertion
of the biological reality of race comes from the mainstream, in significant
54 T he R e t u r n of B i o lo gy
Biomedicine
By far the most powerful engine driving the renewed salience of objectivist
understandings of race and ethnicity is the vast juggernaut of biomedical
research. Medicine has long been a privileged terrain of racial objectivism,
a prime site for the constitution of putatively scientific understandings of
racially differentiated human bodies (Wolff 2006). But the more proxi-
mate context for the return of racial objectivism is the distinctive system of
ethnoracial counting and accounting that has come to be pervasively insti-
tutionalized in biomedical research in the United States in the past two
decades.
Since 1995, researchers supported by the National Institutes of Health
(NIH)—the overwhelmingly dominant funder of biomedical research—
have been required to include racial and ethnic minorities as well as women
as research subjects in clinical trials and to report any differences in results
by race, ethnicity, or sex. This is the basic pillar of what Steven Epstein
(2007) has called the “inclusion-and-difference paradigm” in biomedical
research. That paradigm was subsequently “thickened” and extended in
various ways, notably by Food and Drug Administration (FDA) rules requir-
ing data from drug testing to be broken down by “important demographic
56 T he R e t u r n of B i o lo gy
subgroups,” namely race, sex, and age (Epstein 2007: 117, 123).15 These
reforms, to be sure, built on existing traditions of counting and categoriz-
ing by race and ethnicity in epidemiology and public health. In particular,
they built on a tradition of “health disparities” research that quantifies the
massive inequalities between blacks and whites in nearly every measurable
aspect of health. What was new in the 1990s was how the longstanding
concern with racial disparities in health outcomes legitimized a newly re-
spectable concern with possible racial differences in disease processes.
The institutionalization of this scheme of ethnoracial counting and ac-
counting has been laced with ironies. In the first place, race and ethnicity
were added as an afterthought to a legislative proposal that had been driven
by concerns with women’s health (Epstein 2007: 79). That biological dif-
ferences between men and women might warrant the inclusion of women
in at least some clinical trials (and the breakdown of results by sex) seemed
self-evident; the much more controversial and problematic assumption
that possible biological differences between racial or ethnic groups war-
ranted the inclusion of minorities in clinical trials (and the breakdown of
results by race and ethnicity) escaped serious critical examination. Race
and ethnicity were smuggled in, without serious scrutiny, on the back of a
sex-driven initiative.
Second, the requirements for the use of racial and ethnic categories were
implemented just as subjectivist and constructivist arguments against the
routine and uncritical use of such categories in biomedical research began
to be taken seriously by public health and biomedical researchers and
journal editors. The 1997 revision of the “Uniform Requirements for Man-
uscripts Submitted to Biomedical Journals” cautioned authors about using
racial and ethnic categories and underscored their ambiguity (Epstein 2007:
207). Some journals went further. A Nature Genetics (2000) editorial criti-
cized the use of race and ethnicity as “pseudo-biological variables” and
announced that it would henceforth “require that authors explain why
they make use of particular ethnic groups or populations, and how classi-
fication was achieved”; the Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medi-
cine announced in 2001 that authors should “not use race and ethnicity
when there is no biological, scientific, or sociological reason for doing so”
(Epstein 2007: 208); and a 2004 editorial in the Journal of the American
Medical Association emphasized that the collection of data on race “is not
sufficient reason to analyze outcomes by racial categories” (Winker 2004:
1614).
Third, the inclusion-and-difference paradigm has been self-validating.
By mandating not only the recruitment of subjects but also the analysis
and reporting of results by race and ethnicity, the paradigm was bound to
T h e R e t u r n o f B i olo gy 57
generate just the sort of “difference findings” that were used to justify its
introduction (Lee et al. 2001: 23; Epstein 2007: 109, 220–221). The ava-
lanche of ethnoracially organized data generated by the subgroup com-
parison mandate has guaranteed that many statistically significant findings
would be generated by chance alone.
Fourth, and most important, the requirement to recruit research sub-
jects and report results by race and ethnicity was justified by the growing
salience of racial and ethnic health disparities and the intensifying political
commitment to reducing or eliminating them. Yet while the health dispari-
ties framework in epidemiology and public health highlights the social
causes of disparities, the routine use of ethnoracial categories in biomedi-
cal research highlights putative biological causes of health disparities and
contributes thereby to the naturalization of social categories (Kahn 2005;
Shields et al. 2005; Epstein 2007: 296ff).
One key to this slippage between the social and the biological is the
ambiguity of race as a variable in biomedical research. This is not simply a
problem of how race is measured; it is a problem of what race means in a
biomedical context. Self-identified race is taken by many biomedical re-
searchers as a proxy for geographic ancestry, which is taken as a proxy for
the probability of possessing certain medically relevant genetic variants.16
But self-identified race is also a proxy for a wide array of social and envi-
ronmental factors that are associated both with race and with medical
outcomes. Researchers are of course aware of the potential for confound-
ing, and they routinely seek—if only in a perfunctory way—to control for
confounding factors. But since self-identified race is associated with so
wide a range of social and environmental factors with a known or plausi-
ble connection to health outcomes, and because these are so difficult to
measure, controlling for confounding factors is notoriously difficult
(Kaufman et al. 1997).17 Yet notwithstanding this difficulty, residual racial
differences in medically significant outcomes—differences that remain af-
ter controlling for other factors—are routinely taken as suggesting genetic
rather than social causes (Kahn 2013: 160–161).
A second key to the slippage between the social and the biological is the
bureaucratic logic of what Epstein (2007: 90–93, 147–151) calls “categor-
ical alignment.” In operationalizing the mandate to recruit subjects and re-
port results by race and ethnicity, the NIH and FDA adopted the standard
set of census-based categories that was originally codified by the Office of
Management and Budget (OMB) in its Directive 15 of 1977. Originally is-
sued to ensure consistency in the gathering and reporting of data relevant
to the enforcement of civil rights legislation, the unsung yet astonishingly
influential Directive 15 governs the collection of racial and ethnic data at
58 T he R e t u r n of B i o lo gy
all levels and in all branches of government, and in the private and non-
profit sectors as well. From the point of view of bureaucratic consistency
and comparability, it made sense to import these ubiquitous administra-
tively mandated categories—already used to organize a vast amount of
data, including epidemiological and public health data—into biomedical
research, despite the lack of any biomedical rationale for using what OMB
itself underscored was a “socio-political construct” that was “not anthro-
pologically or scientifically based.”18 But this alignment of ethnoracial cat-
egories across very different institutional domains—administrative prac-
tice, identity politics, and biomedical research—has facilitated the grafting of
biological meanings onto social, political, and administrative categories. As
biomedical “difference findings” have accumulated and have been organized
and filtered through familiar racial and ethnic categories, these categories
have come to be seen, once again, as grounded in biological differences. The
upshot of this categorical alignment has been a deepening naturalization
of social categories through the conflation of the social and biological
meanings of race (Lee et al. 2001: 55; Shields et al. 2005; Epstein 2007:
91–92; Kahn 2006: 1966; Fujimura et al. 2008).
Categorical alignment operates not only between domains but within
the domain of health research. The same ethnoracial categories are used in
both epidemiological and etiological research. Epidemiological research
uses racial categories to monitor health outcomes at the population level;
etiological research uses the same categories to explain disease processes
at the cellular level. Epidemiological research has documented massive
health disparities along racial lines; the use of the same racial categories in
etiological research makes it easy to suggest that these disparities are
grounded in racially differentiated disease processes, and ultimately in ra-
cially differentiated genetic makeup (Kaufman and Cooper 2001; Shields
et al. 2005: 89).19
The case of BiDil, the first race-specific drug to be approved by the FDA,
shows how this slippage can occur in practice.20 BiDil was not originally
targeted by race; nor was it a new drug. It originated as a combination of
two generic vasodilators, then known (by the initials of the generic drugs)
as H/I, whose effectiveness in treating heart failure was suggested by a
clinical trial in the early 1980s. A follow-up study in the late 1980s showed
that ACE inhibitors, a different category of drug, were even more effective
in treating heart failure, and these became part of the standard therapy.
But H/I remained of medical interest since roughly a quarter of all patients
do not respond well to ACE inhibitors (Kahn 2004: 12–13), and a single-
dose version of the combination was patented in 1989 under the name Bi-
Dil. In 1997, however, the FDA declined to approve BiDil, on the grounds
T h e R e t u r n o f B i olo gy 59
that the clinical data from the 1980s trials, which had not been designed
as new drug trials, failed to satisfy criteria for new drug approval.
Only at this stage did race enter the picture. Having discovered racial
differentials in a reanalysis of the data from the 1980s trials, cardiolo-
gists Jay Cohn and Peter Carson were able to secure a new patent for
BiDil as a drug specifically tailored to African Americans. This new racial
spin earned them an additional thirteen years of patent protection. After
a clinical trial exclusively for African Americans (known as A-HeFT)
showed a dramatic decrease in mortality for patients taking BiDil in
addition to standard therapy (including ACE inhibitors), the FDA ap-
proved BiDil in 2005 for the treatment of heart failure in African Ameri-
can patients.
FDA approval made BiDil a media sensation as the first “race drug,” and
the impressive results of A-HeFT seemed to some commentators to vali-
date the argument that heart disease is a “different disease” for blacks and
whites (Kahn 2004: 9–11, 18–20). But in fact A-HeFT showed nothing of
the kind. It showed conclusively that BiDil (in conjunction with standard
therapies) was very effective for some patients. But since A-HeFT was lim-
ited to African Americans, the study did not and could not show that BiDil
was more effective for African Americans than for others. The differential
response by race that emerged in post hoc subgroup analysis of the 1980s
trials, which served as the basis for the race-specific patent, did not pertain
to the use of BiDil in addition to now-standard ACE inhibitors. Treat-
ment of heart failure was quite different in the 1980s, and mortality rates
from heart failure have subsequently declined dramatically across the
board. Post hoc racial subgroup analysis, moreover, is problematic in any
case (Ellison et al. 2008: 2–3); given the association of race with exposure
to a variety of health risks, measured racial differentials are open to a va-
riety of interpretations and provide at best equivocal evidence of biologi-
cally based racial differences in response to treatment.21
The racialization of an originally nonracial drug and the suggestion of a
genetic basis for possible racial differences in drug response illustrate the
importance, underscored earlier, of the ambiguity of race as a variable in
biomedical research and of the alignment of categories across institutional
domains. Because self-identified race encodes both biogenetic and socio-
environmental factors, the racial differences that appeared in the retro-
spective analysis of the 1980s clinical trials could be interpreted as sug-
gesting an underlying genetic cause and as warranting the conversion of
BiDil into a race-targeted drug. And categorical alignment—the employ-
ment of the same ethnoracial categories, operationalized in the same way,
in sociopolitical and biomedical contexts—facilitated the racialization of
60 T he R e t u r n of B i o lo gy
BiDil by enabling its backers to cast the drug as a response to the morally
and politically urgent need to address the apparently dramatic (though in
fact often grossly exaggerated [Kahn 2004: 18ff]) racial disparities in heart
disease.
The evidence for differential response by race to BiDil was outdated and
at best ambiguous. But it is of course possible that BiDil is more effective
in treating African Americans and that this greater effectiveness has some
basis in biology, and ultimately in genetics. Pharmacogenetic research has
identified certain genetic variants that affect drug response, notably by in-
fluencing the behavior of drug-metabolizing enzymes. Such variants can
make a difference both in the effectiveness of a drug and in its side effects.
And some of these variants exhibit nontrivial differences in frequency across
socially defined racial categories (Tate and Goldstein 2004; Goldstein et
al. 2003).22 It’s possible that some such genetic variants make BiDil more
effective, on average, for African Americans.
The irony is that if this were to prove true, race might become less rather
than more relevant. BiDil has been marketed exclusively to African Ameri-
cans and represented as a race-specific drug. Yet if genetic variants affect-
ing the drug’s workings become known, race would lose its clinical signifi-
cance. Instead of prescribing the drug on the basis of a patient’s race, one
could directly test all patients for the relevant genetic variants and adjust
drug choice or dosage accordingly. BiDil might be indicated for a higher
fraction of black than white patients, but it might cease to be a “race
drug.” The assertion of a potential genetic basis for health disparities deep-
ens the racialization of medicine, but the discovery of an actual genetic
basis for differential disease susceptibility or drug response could work in
an individualizing and deracializing direction.23
Just this is the goal of personalized medicine, which seeks to tailor treat-
ment to the unique circumstances, and the unique genome, of every indi-
vidual, and thereby to render race clinically irrelevant (Ng et al. 2008;
Ginsburg and Willard 2009; Personalized Medicine Coalition 2014). Yet in
a further irony, this vision of an eventually personalized, individualized,
and therefore postracial medicine licenses the continued use of race as a
provisional and temporary practice. The rhetoric of eventual personaliza-
tion legitimizes the reality of continued—and even expanded—racialization
(Kahn 2013: 157–165).24 Defenders of the use of racial categories often
concede that race per se is not a biologically meaningful category, that it is
at best a crude surrogate for currently unknown genetic differences, and
that advances in genetic knowledge will eventually obviate the use of this
surrogate. But they argue that it would be irresponsible not to use race as
a serviceable proxy in the meantime.
T h e R e t u r n o f B i olo gy 61
Forensics
variable genetic loci can yield powerful estimates of ancestry and of indi-
vidual ethnoracial self-identification. The notions of “population” and
“ancestry,” to be sure, are elusive and contested, and estimates of ancestry
and self-identification work better in some contexts than in others. It is
obviously much harder to predict the self-identification of someone whose
grandparents have substantially differing biogeographic ancestries than of
someone whose grandparents have similar biogeographic ancestries. Esti-
mates of individual biogeographic ancestry, moreover—typically presented
as percentages of ancestry attributable to three continental regions of
“origin”—raise a host of conceptual and methodological problems and can
generate anomalous or even nonsensical results in some contexts (Royal et
al. 2010).
Still, it is clear that certain polymorphisms, taken in combination with
one another, are indeed powerfully ancestry-informative and can be prag-
matically useful in some forensic contexts. It is this that led the now-
defunct company DNAPrint Genomics to market its panel of ancestry-
informative markers not only to individuals seeking information about
their ancestries but also to law enforcement agencies.33 Its product DNA
Witness, according to promotional material, would identify “the heritable
component of race” and enable police to “determine race proportions
from crime scene DNA”: “This test provides not only the majority popula-
tion affiliation (i.e. Indo European, Sub-Saharan African, East Asian or Na-
tive American), but the admixture, as well (i.e. 82% East Asian and 18%
Indo-European mix)” (Shields and Thompson 2003).
DNAPrint’s technology has been used in a few high-profile cases, the
most notable of which involved a serial killer in Louisiana in 2001–
2003. Crime scene DNA had yielded no hits in the database, and a police
investigation—focused as a result of eyewitness testimony and an FBI pro-
file on a young white man—had reached a dead end. DNAPrint’s panel of
ancestry-informative markers suggested that the investigation was on the
wrong track: the ancestry of the suspect was estimated to be 85 percent
sub-Saharan African and 15 percent Native American. The company’s chief
scientific officer, Tony Frudakis, could not categorically identify the sus-
pect’s ethnoracial self-identification—the suspect “could be African Ameri-
can or Afro-Caribbean.” But he was categorical about one thing: “There is
no chance that this is a Caucasian” (Newsome 2007). Having commis-
sioned from DNAPrint the analysis of a few dozen test samples from
known individuals, the task force charged with the investigation believed
this analysis was credible. The investigation was reoriented, and an Afri-
can American man who had come to the attention of police in other con-
T h e R e t u r n o f B i olo gy 65
texts was arrested and eventually convicted on the basis of a DNA match
to crime scene evidence (Frudakis 2008: 599–603).
Despite this much-publicized success, DNAPrint went out of business
in 2009. Law enforcement agencies in the United States have been hesi-
tant to adopt forensic DNA phenotyping. While cost was one factor, po-
litical sensitivities—and specifically, concerns about a new form of racial
profiling—appear to have played a role as well (Newsome 2007). Yet
while DNAPrint did not survive, forensic DNA phenotyping is likely to
become more rather than less widely used in the future as new techniques—
emerging from the confluence of developments in population genetics, bio-
medical research, direct-to-consumer ancestry testing, and forensics—
promise more accurate results. This may contribute to the naturalization
of race and ethnicity by suggesting that race is ultimately “in our genes.”
Even as sophisticated an observer as Nicholas Kristof (2003) cited the
Louisiana serial killer case in challenging the idea that race is “biologically
meaningless”: “DNA does tend to differ, very slightly, with race. . . . Gene-
tics increasingly shows that racial and ethnic distinctions are real—but
often fuzzy and greatly exaggerated.”
Emergent techniques for predicting phenotypic traits directly from the
genetic variants that code for them, according to some observers, offer a
potential way to avoid the naturalization and reification of race. It may be
possible in the foreseeable future to predict eye color, hair color, skin color,
height, handedness, and other externally visible and therefore potentially
forensically relevant features of an unknown suspect directly, without the
intervening use of identifiers that index self-identified race or biogeographic
ancestry.34 In theory, such techniques could be deracializing: just as person-
alized medicine promises to bypass race by directly analyzing genetic vari-
ants linked to disease susceptibility or drug response, so forensic DNA
phenotyping promises to bypass race by directly analyzing genetic variants
that code for observable traits.35
In practice, however, direct forensic DNA phenotyping is more likely to
reinforce than to transcend race (Sankar 2010). Features like skin color
and facial structure are closely associated with socially defined racial cat-
egories and are likely to be interpreted through a racial lens. And since
socially defined racial categories are deeply and pervasively embedded in
the routine practices of policing, predicted phenotypic traits that are
strongly associated with such categories (such as skin color) are more
likely to be forensically relevant than those (such as height or handedness)
that are not. Most fundamentally, racially associated phenotypic traits are
themselves likely to be differentially relevant in forensic contexts (Ossorio
66 T he R e t u r n of B i o lo gy
2006; M’Charek 2008: 402). Here the distinction between marked and
unmarked traits and categories is useful. The most pragmatically relevant
phenotypic traits in forensic contexts are likely to be those that are them-
selves marked and that are associated with marked racial categories around
which policing activities are already organized. Unmarked traits like light
skin and average stature are unlikely to generate a forensically relevant
class of suspects.36 Red hair is a marked phenotypic trait, but it is not
associated in the United States with a marked ethnoracial category. Dark
skin is a marked phenotypic trait, and it is locally associated with a
marked racial category that is already pervasively embedded in police
work. Because it meshes more closely with routine police practices, a
forensic DNA phenotyping finding that predicts dark skin (or other traits
associated with African Americans or with other marked local minorities)
is likely to have more pragmatic force in forensic contexts than other
findings.
One further way in which socially defined racial categories can be in-
vested with biological authority involves the burgeoning field of behav-
ioral genetics.37 This is a point of intersection between biomedicine and
criminology. The field’s rapid expansion has been driven largely by NIH
and other biomedically oriented funding in the hope of explaining vari-
ability in dispositions and behaviors that contribute to health outcomes.
But the increasing sophistication and rapidly decreasing cost of sequencing
technology have made it easy and inexpensive to include genetic data in
studies that seek to explain dispositions and traits relevant to a wide range
of outcomes and processes, including delinquency and criminality.
Behavioral genetics has no intrinsic connection with race: its fundamen-
tal concern is to explain individual differences, not group differences. Nei-
ther twin studies—designed to estimate the heritability of various disposi-
tions or behaviors—nor more recent molecular-level efforts to link particular
genetic variants to psychological or behavioral outcomes have any neces-
sary connection to race. Yet in a context in which race is already deeply
and pervasively implicated in the workings of the criminal justice system
and in popular representations and understandings of crime, research fo-
cused on identifying possible genetic bases of aggression, impulsivity,
sensation-seeking, and other dispositions or behaviors associated with
crime is easily appropriated and translated into public discourse in ways
that contribute to naturalizing the association between race and crime.
This is particularly true for molecular genetic studies that posit a link be-
tween specific genetic variants and dispositions and behaviors associated
with crime, especially when the variants in question (like some genetic vari-
T h e R e t u r n o f B i olo gy 67
ants that affect disease susceptibility and drug response) are found in dif-
fering frequencies across socially defined racial categories.
A case in point is the MAOA gene, which regulates the activity level of an
enzyme that breaks down neurotransmitters such as serotonin and dopa-
mine in the brain. A number of studies over the course of the past decade
have suggested a connection between forms of this gene that generate low
levels of the enzyme and various forms of “antisocial behavior.” One widely
cited study found that among those exposed to early childhood maltreat-
ment and physical abuse, those with the low-activity form of the MAOA
gene were more likely to develop forms of antisocial behavior as adults
(Caspi et al. 2002). This study found no direct effect of the gene on behav-
ioral outcomes (though it did, like other studies, find a direct effect of child-
hood maltreatment); instead it found evidence of a gene-environment inter-
action, in which the gene affected how individuals responded to adverse
environmental experiences. Some other studies (for example, Huizinga et al.
2006) failed to replicate this result, though a meta-analysis (Kim-Cohen et al.
2006) provided support for it.
The qualified, complex, and contradictory findings about the MAOA
gene—dubbed the “warrior gene” by a journalist in 2004—were appropri-
ated in public discussion in a simplified, often sensationalized, and in some
contexts overtly racialized manner. The Caspi et al. (2002) study had made
no mention of race. But when a New Zealand scientist reported that more
than half of the Maori men he had tested carried the low-activity form
of the gene (roughly twice as many as in European populations), speculated
that this may be linked to their historical seafaring and military prowess,
and allegedly (though the scientist claimed he was misquoted) also linked
this to contemporary problems of alcoholism and violence, the media ran
stories attributing “Maori violence” to the “warrior gene” (Yong 2010).
Similarly reductive and expressly racialized accounts linking a similar prev-
alence of the low-activity form of the MAOA gene to aggression and crime
among African Americans are staples of the far-right blogosphere in the
United States. (These accounts conveniently ignore the similar or higher
prevalence of the low-activity form of the MAOA gene among East Asian
populations [Lea and Chambers 2007]). Even apart from such sensational-
ized and overtly racialized accounts, behavioral genetic findings are likely
to be assimilated in public understandings in ways that downplay complex
gene-environment interactions and strengthen understandings of crime and
aggression as rooted in genetic predispositions. In a context in which crime
is already understood in pervasively racialized terms, this cannot help but
contribute to the naturalization of the association between race and crime.
68 T he R e t u r n of B i o lo gy
Genealogy
2004; Hacking 2006). On balance, the literature suggests that genetic ge-
nealogy cannot be described as simply reinforcing essentialist or naturalist
understandings of race.
In biomedicine and forensics, ancestry is a marker or proxy for genes; in
genetic genealogy, genes are a marker for ancestry. Particular genetic vari-
ants are significant not as causal agents that predispose to disease, behav-
ior, or appearance but as nonfunctional markers—differentially distrib-
uted as a result of ancient and recent migrations, genetic drift, and social
and geographic barriers to random mating—that can be used to make in-
ferences about ancestry and to construct usable stories about who we are
and where we come from.
Two types of tests are commercially available (Royal et al. 2010). The
first (and until very recently by far the most common) uses mitochondrial
DNA markers transmitted from mothers to their children or Y-chromo-
some markers transmitted from fathers to sons to make inferences about
maternal or paternal lineages. Because mitochondrial DNA and Y-chro-
mosome DNA (unlike the rest of our DNA) are transmitted without re-
combination from generation to generation, these tests can yield powerful
inferences about maternal and paternal lineages.39 The inferences may
concern “deep ancestry” (Wells 2007) in a paleoanthropological time frame,
or they may concern the more recent ancestry that is relevant to those in-
terested in tracing particular genealogical relationships or in learning
about the more proximate “origins” of a maternal or paternal lineage.
Deep ancestry tests place people in mitochondrial DNA or Y-chromo-
some haplogroups. These are groups that share a common maternal or
paternal ancestor and a distinctive genetic mutation—a “unique event
polymorphism”—originating with that ancestor.40 Haplogroups represent
biological lineages (not to be confused with socially real or meaningful
lineages) whose origin in space and time can be estimated, whose subse-
quent main paths of migratory dispersion can be conjecturally traced, and
whose contemporary geographic distribution can be mapped. Deep ances-
try tests allow consumers to focus on a single intuitively and concretely
meaningful maternal or paternal lineage, to follow the migration paths of
their ancient ancestors, and to participate vicariously in the “story of the
greatest journey ever told: how our ancestors migrated from their African
homeland to populate the Earth tens of thousands of years ago.”41
For some test takers, haplogroups have become meaningful biosocial
identities. But for others, paleoanthropological time is too remote to be of
interest, and haplogroups are too abstract. Their very names are forbid-
dingly abstract: they bear labels like R1b (also known in an alternative
nomenclature as R-M343). Haplogroup frequencies do differ substantially
T h e R e t u r n o f B i olo gy 71
In the biomedical, forensic, and genealogical domains, genetic data are in-
corporated into specific, institutionalized organizational practices and
routines. Genetic variants figure in these routines as causal agents that af-
fect disease susceptibility and drug response, as individuating and identify-
ing markers, and as indicators of proximate or remote ancestry. The do-
main of the politics of belonging is more diffuse. It is not centered on specific
sets of institutionalized routines. It is defined rather by the ways genetic
data—and the inferences they are held to support about individual and
collective ancestry—are enlisted in the service of claims and struggles over
identity, membership, and belonging (Skinner 2006). Accordingly, while
the preceding sections focused primarily on distinctively U.S. institutional,
organizational, and cultural contexts, this section is less U.S.-focused, re-
flecting the global diffusion of genetically inflected idioms of membership
and belonging.
The politics of belonging is a politics of identity, but it is often at the
same time a politics of interest: who is what has implications for who gets
what. Identity and interest are intertwined on both individual and collec-
tive levels. Tests of ancestry or relatedness (on the individual level) and
T h e R e t u r n o f B i olo gy 75
population genetics findings (on the collective level) can be enlisted to sup-
port claims to an identity or status to which rights or benefits are attached—or
to challenge such claims.
Individual-level genetic data have become relevant to identity claims—or
have been represented as relevant to such claims—in a number of con-
texts. The most salient context in the United States involves tribal mem-
bership claims, especially where tribal wealth confers substantial economic
value on membership.54 A handful of genetic testing companies have tar-
geted the Native American market since around 2000, marketing their ser-
vices both to individuals interested in validating Native American ancestry
and to tribes interested in screening new applicants and existing members.
Two very different kinds of tests have been promoted. The first—like the
ancestry tests discussed in the preceding section—use uniparentally inher-
ited mitochondrial or Y-chromosome DNA to make inferences about single-
stranded maternal or paternal lineages, or they use biparentally inherited
autosomal DNA to make inferences about the percentage of one’s ancestry
that is Native American. The second kind of test compares an individual’s
DNA to that of another known individual so as to establish the genealogi-
cal relationship, if any, between the two.
Individuals might occasionally be interested in tests of specific relation-
ships, but the nature of their close genealogical relationships with living
individuals is ordinarily not in doubt. In marketing their services to indi-
viduals, companies have therefore focused on tests of ancestry. But even if
such tests could reliably ascertain the percentage of one’s genetic ancestry
that is Native American, or could identify a distinctively Native American
Y-chromosome or mitochondrial DNA haplotype—and autosomal admix-
ture tests are known to produce anomalous results in some cases—they
cannot help establish a specific tribal affiliation. The ancestry that matters
in validating a claim to tribal membership, in most cases, is tribal ancestry,
not Native American ancestry. One’s genetic and genealogical ancestry can
be 100 percent Native American, yet one might still fail to satisfy the blood
quantum requirements for membership in any particular tribe.55
Why, then, are individuals interested in ancestry tests that target Native
Americans? Some may believe that such tests can support their claims to
tribal membership. As Kimberly TallBear notes (2013b: 82–88), a number
of companies have promoted their services with false or misleading claims.
Other users, however, may seek testing to bolster or validate a claim to a
Native American, not a specific tribal identity (Golbeck and Roth 2012).
For some, this may be a strategic choice, as in the case of those who are
considering identifying themselves as Native American—or, analogously,
as African American—in college admission or employment contexts (as
76 T he R e t u r n of B i o lo gy
the Aymaras and their similarity to groups in Bolivia that likewise claim
descent from the ancient Urus—served to bolster claims to a distinct cul-
tural identity, to a primordial link with the reed beds of Lake Titicaca, to
an authentic mastery of an ancient and distinctive way of life, and, in a
characteristically flexible twist, to an environmentalist ethos well suited to
the preservation of the unique habitat of the floating islands.59
Genetic research creates political risks as well as opportunities; and
among populations whose claims to indigenous status are securely recog-
nized, the risks may be seen as substantially outweighing the opportunities
(Kent 2013: 550). Studies documenting mixing or migrations, some fear,
might be used to challenge the distinctive status of indigenous populations
or to reduce indigenous rights (Tallbear 2013b: 153–154; Pálsson 2008:
553; Berthier-Foglar 2012: 4, 24–26; Collingwood-Whittick 2012: 305–
307). In the context of a long history of mistrust of Western science, these
concerns may help explain the unwillingness of many indigenous popula-
tions to participate in genetic research projects (Berthier-Foglar 2012).
Identity and interest are intertwined, but the politics of identity cannot
be reduced to a politics of interest, narrowly understood. Genetically in-
formed accounts of who is what and who comes from where have implica-
tions for who gets what, but they have a range of broader implications as
well. The interests at stake are ideal or symbolic as well as material. For
indigenous peoples, these may include interests in the integrity of constitu-
tive myths and origins stories—stories that may be unsettled or under-
mined by genetic accounts (Davis 2004).60 But genetically informed ac-
counts of origins have broad implications for identity and belonging in a
wide range of contexts, not only those involving claims to indigeneity. Popu-
lation genetic studies have become entangled, for example, in arguments
about the origins and antiquity of the caste system in India (Egorova 2010);
in debates about national identity and mestizaje in Mexico (Schwartz-
Marín and Silva-Zolezzi 2010; Benjamin 2013); and in disputes about
miscegenation, racial classification, affirmative action, and “racial democ-
racy” in Brazil (Santos and Maio 2004; Santos et al. 2009). More generally,
population genetic studies have contributed to naturalizing understandings
of nationhood, legitimizing the view that not only race and ethnicity but
nationhood too is built on a distinct biological substrate (Benjamin 2009).
By supporting objectivist understandings of nationhood, genetically in-
formed accounts of who is what and who comes from where can also raise
questions about who (really) belongs where. The British National Party’s
magazine Identity, for example, has given sustained attention to popula-
tion genetic research suggesting that the genetic landscape of Britain was
largely fixed in the Neolithic era and that subsequent ancient migrations
T h e R e t u r n o f B i olo gy 79
had surprisingly little effect on this basic landscape. These findings have
been used by the BNP to bolster its discourse about the threats posed by
immigration to the “indigenous population of Britain” (Bonifas 2008).61
Questions about who belongs where can also be suggested in a much
more subtle way. Genetic understandings of relatedness play into the ex-
plicit, discursively articulated politics of belonging; but they also have im-
plications for the tacit politics of what might be called “deep belonging.”
At stake are not only the formal, tangible, legally specified rights and ben-
efits of belonging, and not only expressly articulated forms of recognition,
but also the informal, symbolic, and invisible privileges of unmarked, un-
questioned, and unproblematic belonging. Belonging is of course claimed,
contested, and negotiated. But there are forms of belonging that are not
claimed or asserted, that are not negotiated, that are not discursively ar-
ticulated. Deep belonging is the product of a frictionless, tacit, taken-for-
granted congruence of self-understandings and recognition by others. Be-
yond the manifold ways in which genetic accounts of origin and relatedness
are articulated in public and private debate, such accounts may reinforce
tacit understandings of who “really” belongs where.
This is shown in Catherine Nash’s study of a project that sought to map
the genetic heritage of the British population.62 The People of the British
Isles project was informed by a self-consciously inclusive and progressive
discourse of diversity and multiculturalism. It expressly rejected the trope
of purity, representing the British population as “mixed up,” underscoring
the diversity of the nation’s genetic heritage, and highlighting the genetic
legacy of successive waves of migration. But the project was built on an
“implicit, yet crucial, distinction between different sorts of genetic diver-
sity” (Nash 2013: 201). The diversity introduced by twentieth-century mi-
grations was screened out in order to focus on the diversity introduced by
the ancient migrations of Romans, Anglo-Saxons, Vikings, and Normans.63
To ascertain the uneven regional distribution of this diverse genetic legacy,
the project sampled only rural Britons whose parents and grandparents
had lived in the same locality. This did not signal an “exclusionary model
of belonging”; it was standard population genetic practice. But it meant
that donors “had to be rural, rooted, and effectively white” (201)—an awk-
ward circumstance for a study expressly framed as a survey of the national
population.
Acknowledging that the project did not take account of recent immi-
grants, the project’s leader, distinguished geneticist Walter Bodmer, ob-
served that “their history relates to their country of origin, not to the Brit-
ish Isles.” This was not an attempt to “delimit belonging through ancestry”;
it was a gesture “imbued with the multicultural principles of sensitivity
80 T he R e t u r n of B i o lo gy
toward the diverse ethnic origins of people in Britain and the validity of
expressing these heritages.” Yet as Nash observes, such gestures “can imply
that the history and heritage of Britain belongs to a certain portion of the
British people of native descent and that other people—‘ethnic minorities’—
have their own equally valid but different heritages.” In this way, “the cul-
ture of groups is imagined as a biological inheritance that is the natural
possession of that group” (2013: 203). The People of the British Isles proj-
ect thus reveals the “ambiguities and contradictions” that result from the
encounter between multiculturalist and antiracist commitments and a “ge-
netic model of belonging and relatedness”—even, implicitly, a “genetic
model of the nation”—that suggests the congruence of “genes, geography,
culture and identity” (193, 204). The subtle “genetic indigenization” (For-
tier 2012) accomplished by this and similar projects of national genetic
mapping, as well as by practices of genetic genealogy, can suggest that “the
historic roots and true home of non-indigenous and implicitly non-white
Europeans must be elsewhere” (Nash 2004: 23).
Nash has remarked on the “inescapably political dimensions of all ac-
counts of origins and ancestors” (2008: 22), including genetic accounts. This
applies not only to the varied forms of the politics of belonging discussed in
this section but also to the practices discussed in previous sections: to the
sampling strategies used by population geneticists in their construction of
ancestral populations; to the use of self-identified race as a crude proxy for
biogeographic ancestry in biomedical research, pharmaceutical develop-
ment, and clinical practice; to the forensic use of “ancestry-informative
markers” to predict the ethnoracial self-identification or phenotype of an
unknown suspect; and to the growing popularity of genetic ancestry tests.
All of these practices are controversial, and all have potentially far-reaching
political implications.
This section has focused not on these broad political implications of the
continued geneticization of biomedicine, forensics, and genealogy but on
the more specific ways genetic ancestry testing and population genetic re-
search bear on claims and struggles over—and tacit understandings of—
identity, membership, and belonging. Having considered various ways in
which genetic data are mobilized in the service of racial and ethnic identity
claims, I should note that genetic data can also be mobilized against such
identity claims—not simply against particular identity claims but against
institutionalized practices of racial identification themselves. In Brazil, no-
tably, genetic evidence has been used to challenge the legitimacy of official
racial classification schemes, specifically the black-white scheme underly-
ing racial quotas in university admissions (Schramm et al. 2012: 4–6). A
2008 open letter by left-wing opponents of racial classification, for exam-
T h e R e t u r n o f B i olo gy 81
defined racial categories—does not turn that social category into a biologi-
cal one.67 Race is not constituted by the facts of genetic difference, just as
ethnicity is not constituted by the facts of cultural difference. People differ
objectively—that is, in ways that do not depend on their beliefs or classifi-
cation practices—in innumerable ways, including their genetic makeup. But
there is an infinite multiplicity of such differences, and they are not constitu-
tive of the phenomenon of race and ethnicity, even when some such differ-
ences are correlated with or captured by racial and ethnic categories.
3. There is structure in human genetic variation, and there are ongoing
debates about the extent to which this variation is not only clinal but also
involves some clustering (Serre and Pääbo 2004; Rosenberg et al. 2005;
Handley et al. 2007; Feldman and Lewontin 2008). Researchers have shown
that clustering algorithms can use data on polymorphic genetic markers to
sort people into sets that closely match self-identified race. But clustering
algorithms are highly sensitive to assumptions, parameter specifications,
sampling procedures, and levels of aggregation (Bolnick 2008; Royal et al.
2010: 667–668; Kalinowski 2011). More fundamentally, the ability to
predict self-identified race from genotype does not turn socially defined
racial categories into biologically meaningful ones. One can infer ancestry
or self-identified race from genotype, but one cannot infer a person’s geno-
type from her ancestry or self-identified race (Feldman and Lewontin 2008:
93). At best, ancestry or self-identified race is a very crude proxy for the
probability of possessing certain genetic variants.
4. For the great majority of genetic polymorphisms used to detect clus-
tering, allele frequency differences between socially defined racial catego-
ries are quite small. Clustering “derives mainly from small differences in
allele frequencies at large numbers of markers, not from diagnostic geno-
types” (Feldman and Lewontin 2008: 92). Some genetic markers, however,
show much greater frequency differences between socially defined racial
categories. And certain rare genetic variants may be found primarily or
even exclusively within a single population (though the relevant popula-
tion may be smaller and more specific than “continental” racial catego-
ries). If the “common disease, rare variant” hypothesis turns out to be cor-
rect, or partially correct, these rare variants, singly or in combination, may
play a significant role in predisposing to certain diseases. The discovery of
such population-specific disease-predisposing rare variants, however,
would not challenge the fundamental tenets of the subjectivist understand-
ing of race. Such variants, rare by hypothesis, might in certain cases be
unique to a particular socially defined racial category, but they would not
be definitive of any socially defined racial category. They would be defini-
tive of a very different kind of category: a specifically genetic “at-risk”
T h e R e t u r n o f B i olo gy 83
category, comprising all and only those who possess the variant (or combi-
nation of variants) in question (Novas and Rose 2000). There would be as
many such categories as there would be disease-predisposing genetic vari-
ants. And none of these categories (being defined by rare variants) would
coincide even roughly with any socially defined racial category, even if the
variant in question were found primarily or exclusively within a single so-
cially defined racial category. No genetic variants are shared by all and only
members of a particular socially defined racial category.
5. The social reality of race and the biogeographic and biogenetic reality
of ancestry are fundamentally different phenomena. The former is founded
on acts of classification and categorization that establish sharp boundaries
and make those boundaries matter. The latter is the accumulated precipi-
tate, at once shared and differentiated, of the entire history of our spe-
cies.68 The subjectivist position is not that these two orders of phenomena
are entirely unconnected. It is not that socially defined racial categories are
entirely arbitrary, bearing no relation to biogeographic and biogenetic an-
cestry. Since social understandings of race and ethnicity emphasize origins
and descent, it would be surprising if socially defined racial and ethnic
categories did not capture, in a crude way, some information about bio-
geographic and biogenetic ancestry.69 But it is also evident that socially
defined racial categories may obscure rather than reveal ancestry. Perhaps
the most striking example is the one-drop rule, which historically classified
as black a person with any known African ancestry. And as is well known,
African Americans in general have substantial amounts of European ances-
try, estimated at around 15 to 20 percent on average, a fact of biogenetic
ancestry that is obscured by the social category “black.” Socially defined
racial and ethnic categories have their own history and politics (Brubaker
et al. 2004: 32–35); and as underscored earlier, they vary substantially
over time, place, and context.
6. Socially defined racial categories—like categories in general—are cat-
egorical, not gradational. They have insides and outsides; they create sharp
distinctions and boundaries. (This holds a fortiori when the categories are
employed in organizational or administrative settings that require either-
or categorization and do not allow for ambiguity.)70 The phenomenon of
race (and ethnicity) is constituted by the ways in which social life is orga-
nized around such distinctions and boundaries. These sharp boundaries do
not exist in nature. Genetic variation does not take the form of discrete
and sharply bounded groups.
7. While avoiding the conflation of the social and the biological, we
should analyze their interface. The conflation of the social and the biological
arises from the routine use of “groupist” language that blurs the distinction
84 T he R e t u r n of B i o lo gy
L anguage and religion are arguably the two most socially and
politically consequential domains of cultural difference in the modern
world. The study of the political accommodation of cultural difference—or
what might be called the political sociology of multiculturalism—would
therefore seem to require sustained attention to both.
Yet there have been few efforts to compare language and religion, the
outstanding exception—and an important inspiration for this chapter—
being a paper by Aristide Zolberg and Litt Woon Long (1999). Language
and religion are of course often discussed together in the literatures on eth-
nicity, nationalism, minority rights, and multiculturalism, but most such
discussions involve passing juxtaposition rather than sustained compari-
son. And the more sustained discussions (see notably Bauböck 2002) tend
to be normative rather than empirical.
It might be suggested that the lack of sustained comparison is not sur-
prising since language and religion are simply not comparable. I do not
want to get sidetracked here by a discussion of the meaning of comparison
or the conditions of comparability. My interests are substantive, not meth-
odological. One can certainly construe religion and language in such a
way that they are not comparable. If one were to define religion in terms
of beliefs and rituals, for example, there would be little leverage for
There are good reasons for expecting language to be more deeply and
chronically politicized than religion under modern conditions. Language,
after all, is a universal and pervasive medium of social life, while religion is
not. If one defines religion broadly enough, to be sure, then religion too can
be seen as a universal social phenomenon. But it is not universal in the same
way.5 Language is a pervasive, inescapable medium of social interaction;
religion is not.6 Moreover, language is a necessary medium of public as well
as private life. It is an inescapable medium of public discourse, government,
administration, law, courts, education, media, and public signage. However
one defines religion, it cannot be said to be an inescapable medium or nec-
essary ground of action in any of these domains.
Public life can in principle be areligious, but it cannot be alinguistic. The
modern state is characterized by direct rule, intensive interaction with citi-
zens, universal public education, and a public sector that provides large
numbers of jobs. As a result, the rules and practices that govern the language
90 L an g uage , R e l i g i on , a n d t he P o l itics o f D ifference
of public life directly affect the material and ideal interests of people with
differing language repertoires (Zolberg and Long 1999: 21). This holds a
fortiori in an economic context in which work is increasingly “semantic
and communicative rather than physical” (Gellner 1997: 85), involving the
manipulation of meanings, not of things. Language is therefore chronically
and pervasively politicized in linguistically heterogeneous modern societ-
ies (Patten and Kymlicka 2003; May 2001).
Religion is also politicized, but it is politicized in different ways and for
different reasons. The state must privilege a particular language or set of
languages, but it need not privilege a particular religion, at least not in the
same way and not to the same degree. Complete neutrality, to be sure, is
now widely recognized as a myth (Bader 2007: 82ff), not least because the
state cannot help but take a position on the question of what counts as
“religion.”7 Moreover, one can easily identify pervasive traces of Christi-
anity in the public life of Western liberal democracies, even in those with
the strongest traditions of separation of church and state or of laicité (Alba
2005). One need think only of such taken-for-granted frameworks as the
reckoning of dates according to the Christian calendar, the organization of
holidays, or the privileging of Sunday as a day of rest—the domain of what
Torpey (2010) calls “latent religiosity.” Yet contemporary liberal polities—
even those that still have some kind of established church, notably the UK
and Scandinavia (apart from Sweden)—have made substantial, though
contested, moves in the direction of a more neutral stance toward differing
religions. Such moves have no counterpart in the domain of language. The
state can approach neutrality with respect to religion, even if such moves
are vulnerable to political pressures;8 but it cannot even approach neutral-
ity with respect to language (Zolberg and Long 1999: 21; Bauböck 2002:
175–176).
There is a second reason for thinking that language should be more
deeply and chronically politicized than religion. According to seculariza-
tion theory, modernity has entailed the progressive privatization and hence
the depoliticization of religion. Events of the past three decades have made
simplistic versions of secularization theory ripe for criticism. But as several
leading analysts of religion have argued, secularization theory is more
complex and interesting than many critics suggest, and it cannot be dis-
missed out of hand.9 For many in the modern world, religion has indeed
become a more individual, subjective, and private experience. To the ex-
tent that this is the case, religion indeed becomes depoliticized, and reli-
gious pluralism can flourish in the private realm without generating con-
flicts in the public sphere. Over the course of the past several centuries,
religion has indeed become much less central to public life and less politi-
L an g uag e , R e l i g i on , a n d t he P o l i t ics o f D ifference 91
cally contentious in the West, while language has become much more cen-
tral and more contentious (Rothschild 1981: 88).
Yet while secularization theory captures an important long-term trend,
a powerful medium-term trend works in the other direction, toward the
deprivatization and therefore the repoliticization of religion (Casanova
1994). On a time scale of decades rather than centuries, conflicts over re-
ligion have intensified, while conflicts over language, as I argue below,
have eased.10 As a result, while religion is not necessarily, chronically, and
pervasively politicized the way language is, the challenges posed by reli-
gious pluralism today—or at least by some forms of religious pluralism—
tend to be more complex and difficult than those posed by linguistic
pluralism.
I want to develop this argument in two stages. I will begin by arguing
that religious pluralism tends to be more robust than linguistic pluralism
in contemporary liberal societies and polities. I will then argue that reli-
gious pluralism entails deeper and more divisive forms of diversity.
and Machalek 1984). People do not ordinarily simply add a new religion
to a repertory of religions, notwithstanding the flourishing of various
forms of hybridity and syncretism, nor do they ordinarily “convert” from
one language to another.
For children of immigrants, to be sure, language change is often substi-
tutive rather than additive; but this reduces heterogeneity in the receiving
country, while religious conversion often increases it. Conversion can also
reduce heterogeneity, and some immigrant groups to the United States—
Taiwanese, for example—exhibit high rates of conversion to Christianity.
But pressures and incentives for conversion to the prevailing religion are
on the whole relatively weak in contemporary liberal societies, while incen-
tives to learn the prevailing language are strong. A whole series of factors,
in addition to immigration, promote religious pluralization in contempo-
rary liberal societies: new religious movements, organized proselytism,
transnational religious networks, an open religious marketplace, and a
general climate of spiritual experimentation. There are no analogous forces
generating linguistic pluralization from within.
So religious conversion, broadly understood, is an important source of
politically significant cultural heterogeneity, while individual-level language
change is not. In contemporary liberal societies, new forms and degrees of
linguistic pluralism are almost exclusively imported (through immigra-
tion), while new forms and degrees of religious pluralism are both im-
ported and endogenously generated through conversion.
The second reason for the greater robustness of religious than linguistic
pluralism is that religious pluralism is more easily reproduced. Here I shift
my perspective from intragenerational to intergenerational change and re-
production. And I adopt a stylized—and of course grossly oversimplified—
contrast between premodern and modern liberal societies.
In premodern societies, linguistic pluralism was more or less self-
reproducing. Linguistic socialization occurred in families and local com-
munities, and it did not require any specialized apparatus. Political authori-
ties made no effort to impose linguistic homogeneity (though they often did
impose religious homogeneity).
In contemporary liberal societies, the situation is reversed: it is now reli-
gious pluralism that is more or less self-reproducing. Religious socializa-
tion occurs in families and local religious communities, and political au-
thorities make no effort to impose religious homogeneity. But linguistic
reproduction now requires what Gellner (1983: chapter 3) called exo-
socialization. It requires prolonged and expensive schooling on a scale that
only the state is ordinarily in a position to provide. So the state is much
more central to linguistic than to religious reproduction.
L an g uag e , R e l i g i on , a n d t he P o l i t ics o f D ifference 93
there has been a shift in the past two decades back to a moderately assimila-
tionist stance (Brubaker 2001). The point I want to underscore here is the
sharp distinction, both normative and institutional, between endogenous
and imported linguistic pluralism. International minority rights regimes
mandate expansive protection for long-established minority languages but
only minimal protection for immigrant languages. And states that provide
elaborate institutional support for historically established minority languages
provide nothing comparable for immigrant languages.16
Liberal countries of immigration do of course accommodate the linguis-
tic diversity generated by immigration in various ways. They may provide
signage, information, voting materials, or bureaucratic forms in minority
languages; translators in medical, legal, or administrative settings; or var-
ious forms of bilingual education. But these pragmatic accommodations
are categorically distinct from the comprehensive parallel school sys-
tems or regimes of territorial autonomy that seek to facilitate the multi-
generational reproduction and preservation of multiple languages within a
single state.
There is thus a sharp distinction between endogenous and imported lin-
guistic pluralism. But there is no sharp distinction between endogenous
and imported religious pluralism. This key point bears restating. Rights
and protections for long-established minority languages are nowhere ex-
tended to immigrant languages. Linguistic settlements, in other words, are
not expandable to include immigrant-borne languages. But religious set-
tlements are expandable: not easily or automatically expandable, but ex-
pandable nonetheless. Many of the rights and recognitions enjoyed by
long-established religions have been extended to immigrant religions. Lib-
eral states have differing historically conditioned modes of accommodat-
ing religious pluralism; but whatever their established mode of accommo-
dation, they face nontrivial pressures to accommodate immigrant religions
on similar terms. These pressures have no counterpart in the domain of
language.
The most salient contemporary instance of course concerns the accom-
modation of Islam in northern and western Europe. It is impossible to do
justice to this vexed and complex issue here. Consider just one example,
from the domain of education. Accommodation on similar terms would
mean providing or permitting Islamic education in public schools in coun-
tries that provide or permit other forms of religious instruction; it would
also mean subsidizing private Islamic schools in countries that subsidize
other private religious schools. Moves to accommodate Islam in this and
other domains have been halting, uneven, and controversial; many Mus-
lims claim with considerable justice that the measures taken have not even
L an g uag e , R e l i g i on , a n d t he P o l i t ics o f D ifference 97
come close to realizing equal treatment. And of course one can point to
spectacular counterexamples in other domains, such as the ban on the
face-covering niqab that has been enacted in France and Belgium and is
under discussion elsewhere, and the Swiss referendum banning the con-
struction of minarets. Yet if one looks beyond cases of highly mediatized
contestation, one can see a steady if slow, contested, and often grudging
move toward accommodation in the educational sphere and other domains.
This has been driven by the courts on the one hand, which have been re-
ceptive to parity claims (Koenig 2010; Joppke and Torpey 2013), and by a
statist and securitarian concern to manage and supervise Muslim popula-
tions on the other (Laurence 2012).
This part of the argument can be summed up as follows: Normative
expectations, institutional frameworks, and individual incentives converge
in fostering a deeper and more robust religious than linguistic pluralism in
liberal societies. Not simply immigration but other factors too make for
increasing, persistent, and institutionalized religious pluralism. Immigra-
tion generates at least as much linguistic as religious heterogeneity, but
migration-generated linguistic heterogeneity is neither intergenerationally
persistent nor institutionally supported. Continuing immigration and clus-
tered settlement patterns sustain the appearance of increasing and persistent
linguistic pluralism, but an ongoing intergenerational language shift tends to
prevent the consolidation of self-reproducing linguistic minorities.
Gender, sexuality, and family life are particularly important (and of course
contested) domains of religious regulation (Friedland 2002; Casanova
2009: 17–18). Some religious norms constitute systems of law that directly
and comprehensively regulate family matters, as Jewish and Islamic norms
do for marriage, divorce, and inheritance. But nearly all forms of organized
religion seek to regulate gender, sexuality, and family life.
The claims of public religion to provide binding and authoritative norms
for the regulation of public and private life challenge the state’s claim to mo-
nopolize the regulation of public life (and to authoritatively regulate certain
areas of private life as well). They also create conflicts with competing forms
of public religion and with those segments of the public (including those
who profess the same religion) who reject the claims of public religion.
These are often deep conflicts of principle, involving fundamental differ-
ences of worldview. It is these that warrant speaking of “deep diversity.”
Language conflicts do not involve such conflicts of principle or worldview.
As Gellner puts it in another context (1983: 117–118), they are conflicts
between people who “speak the same language,” as it were, even when
they do not speak the same language.
Liberal states are committed to a far-reaching accommodation of reli-
gious pluralism, but this commitment can generate quandaries. Liberal states
may be obliged to accommodate forms of religion that promote illiberal
ideas or practices, or they may be obliged to act illiberally in restricting reli-
gious or other freedoms in the name of other values (see, for example, Jop-
pke 2009: 4–5, Triadafilopoulos 2011).
Consider a few examples from the domain of education. Should the
state exempt Christian children from exposure to “secular humanist”
views in school, as some fundamentalist Christian parents in Tennessee
requested (Stolzenberg 1993)? Should it exempt Muslim children from co-
educational physical education classes, as some Muslim parents in Euro-
pean countries have requested (see, for example, German Islam Confer-
ence 2009: 20–22)? Should it allow teachers or students to wear religious
clothing, including the face-covering niqab (Joppke 2009; Joppke and Tor-
pey 2013: chapter 2)? How much leeway should it grant, and what kind of
financial or other support should it provide, to conservative religious
schools (or to forms of home schooling) that cultivate ways of life at odds
with the state’s interest in fostering the development of autonomous indi-
viduals and responsible citizens (Reich 2002: chapter 6)? Or consider the
question that was brought into focus by the Rushdie affair in the late
1990s and revived by the Danish cartoon affair some years later: Should
the state restrict potentially hurtful or offensive speech or expression so
as to protect the sensibilities of members of religious communities (Parekh
L an g uag e , R e l i g i on , a n d t he P o l i t ics o f D ifference 101
Conclusion
remains inevitably flattening, and they miss much of what is distinctive and
interesting about religion and its relation to nationalism.
building blocks for nationalists” (2003: 254–255; see also Hutchison and
Lehmann 1994).
Religion contributed to the origin and development of nationalism not
only through the political appropriation of religious symbols and narra-
tives but also in more indirect ways. Scholars have suggested, for example,
that the Protestant Reformation and the broader process of “confessional-
ization” contributed to the development of nationalism in three ways: by
generating new modes of imagining and constructing social and political
relationships, promoting literacy in and standardization of vernacular lan-
guages, and bringing polity and culture into tighter alignment.
The new ways of imagining and institutionalizing religious community
fostered by the Reformation provided new models for political commu-
nity. This line of argument emphasizes the egalitarian potential inherent in
the notion of the priesthood of all believers, the individualism involved
in the emphasis on the direct study of scripture, and the direct and unme-
diated relationship between individuals and God. These new ways of
imagining religious community have a striking affinity with understand-
ings of “the nation” as an internally undifferentiated, egalitarian commu-
nity to which individuals belong directly and immediately.10 Practices of
congregational self-rule in sectarian Protestantism, moreover, furnished
models for democratic and national self-rule (Calhoun 1997: 72). A com-
plementary argument about new modes of imagining community focuses
on the long-term trajectory of Christianity, furthered by though not origi-
nating in Protestantism. Drawing on Gauchet (1997) and Baker (1994),
for example, Bell (2001: 24–26) has argued that the intensification of the
perceived gap between human and divine allowed the social world to be
conceived in terms of its own autonomous laws. New understandings of
nation—along with related foundational notions, including society, patrie,
civilization, and public—emerged in this context.
Second, by fostering literacy in and prompting the standardization of
vernacular languages, the Reformation laid the groundwork for imagining
nationhood through the medium of language.11 The Protestant emphasis
on direct, unmediated access to scripture promoted the development of
mass literacy, while the concern to make the Bible accessible to the widest
possible audience—and the explosion of popular religious tracts occasioned
by multiplying religious disputes—generated a surge in printing and pub-
lishing in vernacular languages. The proliferation of printed material, in
turn, gave a powerful impetus to the standardization of vernacular lan-
guages. In Anderson’s argument about “print-capitalism,” the publishers of
religious tracts and other materials sought wider markets and assembled
108 R e l i g i o n a n d N at i onalis m
ter government among savage and senile peoples,” and to prevent the
world from “relaps[ing] into barbarism and night,” marking “the American
people as His chosen nation to finally lead in the redemption of the world”
(quoted in Tuveson 1968: vii; Bellah 1975: 38). Yet a century later, the
rhetoric of mission used in connection with the war in Iraq and, more
broadly, in connection with the “global war on terror” and the mission of
“spreading freedom,” has certain evident similarities.
Yet while it is easy enough to show how religious or religiously tinged
language and imagery are used to frame talk about the special character,
mission, or destiny of a nation, it is more difficult to specify the precise
nature of the connection between religion and nationalism or nation-
hood in such cases. Consider briefly three conceptual and methodologi-
cal difficulties.
First, what is religious about the religious or religiously tinged language,
narratives, tropes, or images that are used to frame or color nation- or
country-talk? Consider the political uses of the language of “sacredness.”
When state representatives or nationalists speak of “sacred” ideals, “sacred”
territory, or “sacred” causes, does this signal an intertwining of religion and
nation (or state)? Or can it be considered simply one of many metaphorical
traces of originally religious language? Allusions to the Bible permeate all of
English literature, even literature that is in no way religious. Should we think
of this in terms of the intertwining of religion and literature? Or should we
note that, while the modern English language has indeed been profoundly
shaped by religion, metaphors and other figures of speech that derive ulti-
mately from religious texts and traditions can be used, in English as in any
other language, to communicate in ways that are not distinctively religious?
After all, sometimes a metaphor is just a metaphor.
When reference is made today to America’s distinctive mission in the
world, is this evidence of the religious nature of American nationalism? Or,
if one were to trace the rhetoric of mission from the New England colonies
of the seventeenth century through the present, would one be more struck
by the progressive secularization of that rhetoric? The specifically religious
resonance or force of the rhetoric of national mission would seem to be
much weaker today than in the New England colonies or seventeenth-
century Netherlands. In the peroration to the Protestant Ethic, Weber
(1958) spoke of victorious capitalism no longer needing the support of re-
ligion. Whatever the role of religion in the origins of nationalism, we might
well say the same thing about victorious nationalism today (cf. Greenfeld
1992: 77).
One question, then, is what counts as religious language and imagery,
as opposed to religiously tinged or originally religious but subsequently
112 R e l i g i o n a n d N at i onalis m
The fourth and final way of analyzing the connection between religion and
nationalism involves the claim that religious nationalism is a distinctive
kind of nationalism. The claim is not simply that nationalist rhetoric may
be suffused with religious imagery or that nationalist claims may be framed
and formulated in religious or religiously tinged language. This is indisput-
ably true. It is not simply a claim about a religio-national symbiosis or in-
terpenetration, which no doubt often exists. The argument I want to ex-
amine here concerns not the rhetorical form of nationalist claims, or the
language or imagery used to frame them, but the content of those claims.
It is an argument that there is a distinctively religious type of nationalist
program that represents a distinct alternative to secular nationalism.
The claim for a distinctively religious form of nationalism has been most
fully articulated by Roger Friedland (2002; see also Juergensmeyer 1993).
Friedland defines nationalism in statist terms. He characterizes national-
ism as “a state-centered form of collective subject formation”; as “a pro-
gram for the co-constitution of the state and the territorially bounded
population in whose name it speaks”; and as “a set of discursive practices
by which the territorial identity of a state and the cultural identity of the
people whose collective representation it claims are constituted as a singu-
lar fact” (2002: 386).
This statist definition allows Friedland to conceptualize religious na-
tionalism as a particular type of nationalism. Nationalism is understood as
114 R e l i g i o n a n d N at i onalis m
a form with variable content. The form prescribes the “joining of state,
territoriality, and culture” (2002: 387) but does not specify how they are
to be joined. It leaves open the content of state-centered collective subject
formation, the content of the discursive practices through which the terri-
torial identity of a state and the cultural identity of a people are “consti-
tuted as a singular fact.” Religion provides one way of specifying this con-
tent. It provides a distinctive way—or a distinctive family of ways—of
joining state, territoriality, and culture.
Religion is able to do so, on Friedland’s account, because it provides
“models of authority” and “imaginations of an ordering power” (2002:
390). Religion is a “totalizing order capable of regulating every aspect of
life” (390)—though Friedland acknowledges that this is less true of Chris-
tianity, given its origins as a stateless faith. Religious nationalism joins state,
territory, and culture primarily by focusing on family, gender, and sexuality:
by defending the family’s powers of social reproduction and moral social-
ization against economic and cultural forces that weaken them; by uphold-
ing traditional gendered divisions of labor within and outside the family;
and by seeking to contain sexuality within the family.
This is a sophisticated and interesting argument. It usefully focuses at-
tention on the distinctively religious content of programs for the ordering
and regulating of public and private life rather than on the religious inflec-
tion of political rhetoric or the religious identities of political contestants.
Neither of the latter is necessarily associated with a distinctively religious
nationalist program. In Northern Ireland, for example, political rhetoric is
often inflected by religious motifs, images, and symbols, and religion is the
key diacritical marker that defines the parties to the conflict. Yet the con-
flict is not “about” religion; no major claims are made about ordering and
regulating public life according to religious principles. This is a classical
nationalist conflict, not a case of a distinctively religious kind of national-
ism (Jenkins 1997: chapter 8).
What, then, is a case of religious nationalism in this strong sense? Fried-
land casts his definitional net widely; he sees religious nationalism at work
in a wide range of settings, including the United States, India, Iran, Israel,
Palestine, Turkey, Algeria, Egypt, and Pakistan. But while he discusses Chris-
tian fundamentalism and Hindu nationalism in some detail and touches
on Jewish nationalism, he devotes his most sustained attention to Islamist
movements. Since these pose in sharp form certain questions about the
category of religious nationalism, I will focus on these.
There are certain striking similarities between Islamist movements and
familiar forms of nationalism. Islamist movements invoke a putatively ho-
mogeneous prepolitical identity (the umma, or community of Muslims) that
R e l i g i o n a n d N at i on alis m 115
ought, on some accounts, to have its own state, a restored caliphate. They
hold that public life should safeguard and promote the distinctive values of
this community. They seek to awaken people to their “true” identities and
to bring culture and polity into close alignment. They protest against the
“alien” rule of non-Muslims over Muslims or of governments that are
only nominally Muslim, and they seek to purify the polity of corrupting
forms of alien influence (moral, cultural, or economic). In Friedland’s terms,
they seek to join state, territory, and culture. In these and other ways, Is-
lamist movements partake of the underlying “grammar” of modern na-
tionalism even when they are ostensibly antinationalist or supranational.
Islamists, moreover, have often allied with nationalist movements, and
they have sometimes fused with them. Hamas, for example, combines a
classical state-seeking nationalist agenda with a distinctively religious pro-
gram of Islamization, though not without considerable tension (Aburaiya
2009; Pelham and Rodenbeck 2009). Yet most Islamist movements, al-
though they work through the state, are not oriented to the nation.
The territorial nation-state remains the dominant political reality of our
time; reports of its death or debility have been greatly exaggerated. Is-
lamist movements—like other forms of politicized religion—accommodate
themselves to this reality, even when they have transnational commitments
or aspirations. The claim of the nation-state to regulate all aspects of life
makes it an inescapable arena of engagement. In pervasively state-organized
societies, “no movement that aspires to more than mere belief or inconse-
quential talk in public can remain indifferent to state power” (Asad 2003:
200). But the fact that Islamist movements seek to gain or influence the
exercise of power within particular nation-states does not make them na-
tionalist (Arjomand 1994; Asad 2003: chapter 6).
Nationalism is a useful concept only if it is not overstretched. If the con-
cept is not to lose its discriminating power, it must be limited to forms of
politics, ideology, or discourse that involve a central orientation to “the
nation”; it cannot be extended to encompass all forms of politics that
work in and through nation-states (cf. Smith 1991: 74). There is no com-
pelling reason to speak of “nationalism” unless the imagined community
of the nation is widely understood as a primary focus of value, source of
legitimacy, object of loyalty, and basis of identity. But the nation is not
understood in this way by most Islamist movements. This points to the
limits of Friedland’s state-centered understanding of nationalism. If Is-
lamism is a form of nationalism, it is nationalism without a central role for
“the nation.”
Some scholars have argued that the umma—the worldwide community
of Muslim believers—is a kind of nation. On this account, the forms of
116 R e l i g i o n a n d N at i onalis m
transborder politicized Islam that have taken root especially among mar-
ginalized second- and third-generation immigrant youth in Europe—
oriented to the global umma, nurtured primarily in cyberspace, articulated
increasingly in English, and promoted by a new class of Internet-based
interpreters of Islam (Anderson 2003)—are therefore a kind of deterritori-
alized nationalism (Saunders 2008). Abstracting from the ethnic and na-
tional identities and the traditional religious beliefs and practices of their
parents and grandparents, “Muslim” has indeed become a powerful cate-
gorical identity in Europe (Brubaker 2013). This holds even among the
nonobservant, so it is correct to say that “Muslim” is not simply a reli-
gious identity. But there is no compelling reason for regarding “Muslim”
as a specifically national identity. A key distinguishing feature of nation as
an imagined community—and of nationalism as an ideology—is that any
given nation is imagined as limited, as just one among many other such
nations (Anderson 1991: 7). The social ontology of nationalism is in this
sense “polycentric” or “pluralist” (Smith 1983:158–159, 170–171). The
umma is not imagined as limited in this way, as one nation alongside oth-
ers. Nor is the umma imagined as actually or potentially sovereign—as the
ultimate source of political legitimacy (Asad 2003: 197–198). The forms
of politics built around this categorical identity are therefore not usefully
characterized as nationalist.
The four ways of studying the relation between religion and nationalism
that I have distinguished and delineated are neither exhaustive nor mutu-
ally exclusive. They do not represent alternative theories; they do not pro-
vide different answers to the same questions but ask different kinds of
questions. My aim has not been to argue for the merits of one of the four
approaches over the others; all represent interesting and valuable lines of
research. I have sought rather to give a sense of the range and variety of
questions that can be asked about the relation between the large and mul-
tidimensional fields of phenomena we call religion and nationalism.
I would like to conclude this chapter by reconsidering the much-criticized
understanding of nationalism as a distinctively secular phenomenon. A
secularist bias in the study of nationalism, like the secularist bias in many
other domains of social science, long obscured interesting connections and
affinities between religion and nationalism. Long-dominant moderniza-
tionist arguments, emphasizing socioeconomic modernity (Gellner 1983;
Deutsch 1953), political modernity (Breuilly 1994; Tilly 1996; Hechter
R e l i g i o n a n d N at i on alis m 117
The modern use of the word diaspora, as Stéphane Dufoix has shown, de-
rives from the Septuagint, the first Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible.3
The word is used there to describe not the fact of dispersion but the threat
of dispersion that will befall the Jews, as divine punishment, if they do not
respect God’s commandments. Later, in the first century of the Christian
era, the word came to be applied to the actual dispersion of the Jews fol-
lowing the destruction of the Second Temple, and it was then applied by
extension to the early Christian dispersion. For nearly two millennia the
term functioned as a proper noun, or at least as a category with a strictly
limited membership; diaspora simply was the Jewish dispersion, or the
early Christian dispersion. Later still, in the context of the Reformation,
the term was used with reference to the links between Protestant evangeli-
cal missions in different countries. But until perhaps fifty years ago, the
term was limited to specifically Jewish and Christian religious contexts.
As discussions of diasporas began to branch out to include other cases,
they remained oriented, at least initially, to the paradigmatic Jewish case.
When historian George Shepperson introduced the notion of the African
diaspora, he did so by expressly engaging the Jewish experience of forcible
dispersion (Shepperson 1966; Edwards 2001; Alpers 2001). The Palestin-
ian diaspora too has been construed as a “catastrophic” diaspora or a
“victim diaspora” (Cohen 1997) on the model of the Jewish case. The con-
cept of the trading diaspora—or the “mobilized diaspora” (Armstrong
1976)—was constructed on the model of another aspect of the Jewish, as
well as the Greek and Armenian, experience.4 An orientation to this para-
digmatic case also informs a number of influential overviews, including
those of Safran (1991), Clifford (1994), and Cohen (1997).
In several more recent extensions of the term, however, the reference to
the paradigmatic case has become more attenuated. Some emigrant groups—
characterized as “long-distance nationalists” by Anderson (1998)—have
been construed as diasporas because of their continued involvement in
homeland politics.5 In a further extension, the term has come to embrace
labor migrants and their descendants who maintain (to some degree) emo-
tional and social ties with a homeland.6 Even older populations of migrant
origin that have been largely assimilated, like Italians in the United States,
have been characterized as diasporas.7 The study of diaspora has become
coextensive with the study of social formations emerging from any kind of
migration: “to say ‘migration,’ ” as Roger Waldinger (2008: xi) has put it,
“is now to say ‘diaspora.’”
Some further extensions go even beyond migration. Diasporas are said to
result from the movement of borders over people, not simply from that of
people over borders. Hungarians, Russians, and other ethnonational com-
T he “ D i asp or a” D i aspo ra 121
Criteria
Dispersion
Dispersion in space is today the most widely accepted criterion of diaspora
and also the most straightforward. It can be interpreted strictly as forced
or otherwise traumatic dispersion;14 more broadly as any kind of disper-
sion in space, provided that the dispersion crosses state borders; or (in the
increasingly common metaphorical extensions of the term) more broadly
still, so that dispersion within state borders may suffice.
Although dispersion is widely accepted as a criterion of diaspora, it is
not universally accepted. Some substitute division for dispersion, defining
diasporas as “ethnic communities divided by state frontiers” (King and
Melvin 1999: 108; see also King and Melvin 1998) or as “that segment of
a people living outside the homeland” (Connor 1986: 16). This allows even
compactly settled populations to count as diasporas when part of the pop-
ulation lives as a minority outside its ethnonational “homeland.”
T he “ D i asp or a” D i aspo ra 123
Homeland Orientation
The second constitutive criterion is the orientation to a real or imagined
“homeland” as an authoritative source of value, identity, and loyalty. Here
a significant shift can be discerned in recent discussions. Earlier discus-
sions strongly emphasized this criterion. Four of the six criteria specified
by Safran (1991), for example, concern the orientation to a homeland.15
These include maintaining a collective memory or myth about the home-
land; regarding the “ancestral homeland as their true, ideal home and as the
place to which they or their descendants would (or should) eventually re-
turn”; being collectively “committed to the maintenance or restoration of
the homeland and to its safety and prosperity”; and “continu[ing] to re-
late, personally or vicariously,” to the homeland, in a way that significantly
shapes one’s identity and solidarity (83–84).
Several more recent discussions de-emphasize homeland orientation (Clif-
ford 1994; Anthias 1998; Falzon 2003). Clifford, for example, has criticized
what he calls the “centered” model of Safran and others, in which diaspo-
ras are by definition “oriented by continuous cultural connections to a
[single] source and by a teleology of ‘return.’ ” On this strict definition, as
Clifford notes, many aspects of the Jewish experience itself do not qualify.
Nor would the experience of dispersed African, Caribbean, or South Asian
populations; the South Asian diaspora, for example, is “not so much ori-
ented to roots in a specific place and a desire for return as around an abil-
ity to recreate a culture in diverse locations.” For Clifford, “decentered,
lateral connections may be as important as those formed around a teleol-
ogy of origin/return” (1994: 305–306). Cohen (2009) has sought to stake
out a middle ground between classical homeland-focused and “postmod-
ern” homeland-deconstructing accounts of diaspora; he distinguishes be-
tween “solid,” “ductile” (flexible), and “liquid” (virtual) understandings of
homeland and finds empirical support for all three.16
Boundary Maintenance
The third constitutive criterion is what, following Armstrong (1976:
394–397), I call boundary maintenance, involving the preservation of a
distinctive identity vis-à-vis the host society (or societies). Armstrong invokes
Barth’s seminal 1969 contribution to emphasize the importance of boundar-
ies for collectivities that do not have “their own” territorial polity: “Clearly,
a diaspora is something more than, say, a collection of persons distin-
guished by some secondary characteristic such as, for example, all persons
with Scottish names in Wisconsin. . . . The mobilized diaspora . . . has
124 T he “ Di as p or a” D i as po ra
Whether the various diasporas that have been nominated into existence in
recent decades will have this kind of multigenerational staying power is by
no means clear.17
A Radical Break?
widely accepted by the end of the 1960s. So much emphasis was placed on
ethnic persistence in the historical and sociological literature between about
1965 and 1985—again, before the “diaspora” explosion—that there has
even been, in reaction, a certain “return of assimilation” (Brubaker 2001)
in the past two decades (albeit of a more subtle, multidimensional, and
normatively ambivalent concept of assimilation).
More important than the alleged novelty and originality of the literature
is the alleged novelty and import of the phenomenon itself. Does diaspora—
along with kindred terms such as transnationalism, postnationalism, glo-
balization, deterritorialization, postcolonialism, creolization, transcultur-
alism, and postmodernity—name something fundamentally new in the
world? Do these terms mark—or at least augur—an epochal shift, as some
theorists have suggested (Kearney 1991; Appadurai 1996)? Have we
passed from the age of the nation-state to the age of diaspora?
More specifically, does the “unprecedented porosity” of borders (Sheffer
2003: 22)—the unprecedented circulation of people, goods, messages, im-
ages, ideas, and cultural products—signify a basic realignment of the rela-
tionship between politics and culture, territorial state and deterritorialized
identities? Does this entail the transcendence of the nation-state, based on
territorial closure, exclusive claims on citizens’ loyalty, and a homogeniz-
ing, nationalizing, assimilationist logic? Does the age of diaspora open up
new possibilities for what Clifford has called “non-exclusive practices of
community, politics, and cultural difference” (1994: 302)? Does it offer
“an alternative to life in territorially and nationally marked groups”?20
Obviously the world has changed, and so have our ways of talking
about it. But one should be skeptical of grand claims about radical breaks
and epochal shifts (Favell 2001). Can one in fact speak of an unprecedented
porosity of borders? Not with regard to the movement of people. Over the
course of the past century and a half, states have gained rather than lost
the capacity to monitor and control the movement of people through in-
creasingly sophisticated technologies of identification and control, includ-
ing citizenship, passports, visas, surveillance, integrated databases, and
biometric devices.21 The shock of 9/11 has only pushed states further and
faster along a path on which they were already moving. No liberal state, to
be sure, can absolutely seal its borders. On balance, however, the world’s
poor who seek work or refuge in prosperous and peaceful countries en-
counter a tighter mesh of state regulation and have fewer opportunities for
migration to prosperous and peaceful countries than they did a century
ago (Hirst and Thompson 1999: 30–31, 267).
Is migration today unprecedented in volume and velocity? How one an-
swers this question depends, of course, on one’s units of analysis. Migrant
T he “ D i asp or a” D i aspo ra 127
flows of recent decades to the United States are in fact much smaller, in
relation both to the population of the United States and to the population
of the rest of the world, than those of a century ago. And while contempo-
rary migrations worldwide are “more geographically extensive than the
great global migrations of the modern era,” they have been characterized as
“on balance slightly less intensive” (Held et al. 1999: 326, emphasis added).
Even though there are more than 200 million migrants worldwide, this
amounts to only 3 percent of the global population, and fewer than half of
these are involved in south-north migration (International Organization
for Migration 2013: 55); the mobility of the great majority, as I argued in
Chapter 1, remains severely limited by the morally arbitrary facts of birth-
place and inherited citizenship and by the exclusionary policies of states.
Is migration today neither unidirectional nor permanent? Of course not,
in many cases; but it was neither unidirectional nor permanent, in many
cases, a century ago. Historians have long highlighted the very high rates of
return migration from North America to various European countries of ori-
gin in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Do migrants make a
sharp and definitive break with their homelands? Of course not. But nor
did they do so a century ago, as an abundant historical literature has made
clear. Do migrants sustain ties with their country of origin? They do in-
deed, but they managed to do so by nonelectronic means a century ago
(Morawska 2001; Hollinger 1995: 151ff; Waldinger and Fitzgerald 2004).
This is not to say that nothing has changed or that distance-eclipsing tech-
nologies of communication and transportation do not matter; it, is, how-
ever, to caution against exaggerated claims of an epochal break.
Have the exclusive claims of the nation-state been eroded? They have
indeed. But the nation-state—as opposed to the multifarious particular
nation-states—is a figment of the sociological imagination. “The” nation-
state is the primary conceptual “other” against which diaspora is defined—
and often celebrated (Tölölyan 1991; Clifford 1994: 307). But there is a
risk of essentializing “the” nation-state, a risk of attributing to it a time-
less, self-actualizing, homogenizing “logic.”22 Sophisticated discussions are
sensitive to the heterogeneity of diasporas, but they are not always as sen-
sitive to the heterogeneity of nation-states. Discussions of diaspora are
often informed by a strikingly idealist, teleological understanding of the
nation-state, which is seen as the unfolding of an idea, the idea of national-
izing and homogenizing the population.23 The conceptual antithesis be-
tween nation-state and diaspora obscures more than it reveals, occluding
the persisting significance (and great empirical variety) of nation-states
(Mann 1997).
128 T he “ Di as p or a” D i as po ra
Diasporas are treated here as “bona fide actual entities” (245) and cast as
unitary actors. They are seen as possessing countable, quantifiable mem-
berships. And indeed they are counted. Sheffer claims to have made the
“first attempt to estimate the real numbers of the main historical, modern,
and incipient diasporas” (104, emphasis added).24
Sheffer recognizes in principle the difference between “core,” “mar-
ginal,” and “dormant” members of diasporas (2003: 100), but his numeri-
cal estimates—which seem designed to be maximally inclusive—take no
account of differing degrees and modes of diasporic engagement. The very
notion of “dormant members” of a diaspora is problematic: if they are re-
ally dormant—if they have “assimilated or fully integrated” into a host
society and merely “know or feel that their roots are in the diaspora group”
(100)—then why should they count, and be counted, as “members” of the
diaspora at all?
What is it that Sheffer and others are counting when they count “mem-
bers” of diasporas? It appears that what is usually counted—or rather es-
timated—is ancestry. But if one takes seriously boundary maintenance,
lateral ties to fellow diaspora members in other states, and vertical ties to
the homeland, then ancestry is surely a poor proxy for membership in a
diaspora. Enumerations such as this suggest that discussions of diaspora op-
portunistically combine elements of strong and weak definitions.25 Strong
definitions are used to emphasize the distinctiveness of diaspora as a social
form; weak definitions, to emphasize numbers (and thereby the import of
the phenomenon).
T he “ D i asp or a” D i aspo ra 129
And it is becoming less rather than more so over time, as the large major-
ity of those who identify as Armenians distance themselves from diasporic
stances, from links to the homeland, and from links to Armenians in other
countries. Their “Armenianness” is closer to what Herbert Gans (1979)
long ago called “symbolic ethnicity.”
There is of course a committed diasporan or diasporic fraction, as Tölölyan
(1996: 18) calls it, among Armenians and many other dispersed populations.
And they have good reason to refer to all dispersed Armenians as a “dias-
pora.” For them, diaspora is a category of practice and central to their proj-
ect. But why should we, as analysts, use diaspora to refer to all persons of
Armenian descent living outside Armenia? The disadvantage of doing so is
that it occludes the difference between the actively diasporan fraction and
the majority who are not committed to the diasporic project.
In sum, rather than speak of “a diaspora” or “the diaspora” as an entity,
a bounded group, or an ethnodemographic or ethnocultural fact, it may be
more fruitful—and it would certainly be more precise—to speak of dia-
sporic stances, projects, claims, idioms, and practices. We can then explore
to what extent, and in what circumstances, those claimed as members of
putative diasporas actively support, passively sympathize with, or are in-
different or even hostile to the diasporic projects pursued in their name.31
Scholars have suggested that diaspora provides an alternative to teleo-
logical, nation-statist understandings of immigration and assimilation. But
theories of diaspora have their own teleologies. Diaspora is often seen as
destiny—a destiny to which previously dormant members (or previously
dormant diasporas in their entirety) are now “awakening” (Sheffer 2003:
21). Embedded in the teleological language of “awakening”—the lan-
guage, not coincidentally, of many nationalist movements—are essentialist
assumptions about “true” identities. Little is gained if we escape from one
teleology only to fall into another.
The point is not to deflate diaspora but rather to desubstantialize it. The
“groupness” of putative diasporas, like that of putative “nations,” is con-
tingent and variable. It is the stake of practical struggles—political, social,
and cultural—over the making and remaking of groups. We should not, as
analysts, prejudge the outcome of such struggles by imposing groupness
through definitional fiat. We should seek rather to bring the struggles them-
selves into focus. To this end, we should treat diaspora as a category of
practice, project, claim, and stance rather than as a bounded group.
chapter six
Migration, Membership,
and the Nation-State
with the civic incorporation of the working class, whose formal member-
ship in the nation-state was not in doubt. A related current of work ad-
dressed the civic incorporation of African Americans (Parsons 1965).
Even where the politics of belonging arises in response to migration, one
can distinguish the politics of substantive membership or citizenship in the
state from the politics of formal belonging to the state. Much work on the
civil, political, and social rights of migrant workers in Europe, for exam-
ple, has been concerned with substantive citizenship, not formal belong-
ing; such work has focused on rights that are not contingent on a particu-
lar membership status in the state (Brubaker 1989; Soysal 1994; Chauvin
and Garcés-Mascareñas 2012).
Third, I want to distinguish formal and informal aspects of the politics
of belonging. Certain kinds of membership—legal nationality or state mem-
bership, for example—are administered by specialized personnel using
formal, codified rules. Nation membership in a more informal sense, how-
ever, is administered not by specialized personnel but by ordinary people
in the course of everyday life, using tacit understandings of who belongs
and who does not, of us and them.5 These everyday membership practices
of identification and categorization, and of inclusion and exclusion, are
often at variance with codified forms of official, formal membership. Per-
sons may be formally included but informally excluded, as suggested by the
expression français de papier (paper Frenchman), or they may be formally
excluded but informally included, as suggested by the literature on the sup-
port undocumented migrants have found from NGOs, schools, churches,
and other local institutions.6
Fourth, and most important for the discussion that follows, I want to
distinguish internal and external dimensions or sites of the politics of be-
longing. The internal politics of belonging concerns populations that are
durably situated within the territorial ambit of the state yet are not—or
not fully—members of that state, or whose terms of membership in the state
are contested. The external politics of belonging concerns populations that
are durably situated outside the territorial ambit and jurisdiction of the
state yet claim—or are claimed—to belong, in some sense, to the state or
to “its” nation.
The internal and external politics of belonging can be connected in three
ways. (1) They can be reciprocally connected between states: a population
that is the focus of an internal politics of membership in one state may be
the focus of an external politics of membership in another. This reciprocal
link arises in many cases through migration. As immigrants, for example,
Mexican migrants and their descendants are the subjects and objects of an
internal politics of belonging in the United States; as emigrants, they are
M i g rat i o n , Me mb e rs h i p, a n d t he Natio n- S tate 135
their ancestors emigrated. Yet (3) these transborder populations have been
represented as belonging to the German or Korean nation and have been
understood, though not uncontroversially, as having a legitimate claim on
the “homeland” state.
Why have West Germany, postunification Germany, South Korea, and, in
certain contexts, North Korea treated these transborder populations as
“their own” and extended rights and privileges to them? More generally,
how and why are certain populations, but not others, construed as “belong-
ing” in some respect to states other than those in which they are settled?
This is a question that has seldom been raised in the literature. The lit-
erature on the external politics of belonging has tended to take the exis-
tence of such transborder populations for granted. It has not been cen-
trally concerned with the social and political processes through which
states identify and constitute some—but not other—transborder popula-
tions as “their own.” It has focused on configurations in which the identi-
fication of transborder kin has been relatively unproblematic, by virtue of
the recent movement of people over borders or borders over people, which
generates relatively clear-cut relations between home states and their trans-
border emigrant populations or between territorially restructured, often
“downsized” states and their newly transborder ethnonational kin. In both
configurations, the transborder populations are relatively clearly bounded
and identifiable because they are not simply emigrants or ethnonational
kin but are also either citizens or former citizens of the “homeland” state
in question or descendants of such persons.
In the German and Korean cases, the identification of transborder kin has
been much more complicated. For most of their centuries-long existence, the
German-speaking settlements of central and eastern Europe had no particu-
lar connection to Germany, which, after all, did not even exist as a uni-
fied state until 1871. Even after 1871, the ties between scattered German-
speaking communities and Germany were tenuous and—until World War
I—politically insignificant. It was only a complex chain of events that led the
postwar West German state to embrace these populations as transborder
coethnics and to extend certain rights and privileges to them. These included
German defeat in World War I; the rise of völkisch nationalism; the Nazi
eastward expansion and Nazi resettlement initiatives for transborder Ger-
mans; the Soviet deportations of Germans to Central Asia; the postwar ex-
pulsions of ethnic Germans from Czechoslovakia, Poland, and other coun-
tries; and the restrictive exit policies (and assimilationist cultural policies)
of East European communist regimes. In the post–cold war era, the privi-
leges extended to these transborder coethnics became increasingly difficult
142 M i g r at i o n , Me mb e rs h i p, a n d th e Natio n- State
hermetically sealed, but states (and the Schengen zone) have not lost their
capacity to regulate the movement of persons across them. Nor has mem-
bership been recast in a way that bypasses or transcends the nation-state.
The nation-state remains the decisive locus of membership even in a glo-
balizing world; struggles over belonging in and to the nation-state remain
the most consequential forms of membership politics.
By disturbing the congruencies—between residence and citizenship, be-
tween nation membership and state membership, and between culture and
polity—central to the idealized model of the nation-state, migration has
long generated, and continues to generate, both an internal and an exter-
nal politics of belonging. The former concerns those who are long-term
residents but not full members of a state, the latter those who are long-
term residents (and often citizens) of other states yet who can be repre-
sented as belonging, in some sense, to a “homeland” or “kin” state or to
“its” eponymous nation.
Recent scholarly attention has focused primarily on the external politics
of belonging. New forms of external membership have indeed been insti-
tuted in recent years, but they are hardly unprecedented; numerous exam-
ples of external membership politics are available from the late nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries. Moreover, the recent forms of the external
politics of belonging are neither postnational nor transnational; they are
forms of transborder nationalism. They do not presage the transcendence
of the nation-state; they indicate rather the resilience and continued rele-
vance of the nation-state model.
Nationalism is a remarkably flexible and adaptable political idiom. Re-
cent trends in external membership politics demonstrate this adaptability.
Today the language of nationalism is used to identify and constitute cer-
tain transborder populations as members of a nation and to justify main-
taining or reestablishing ties with them; in other contexts, that language
has been used in effect to “excommunicate” such populations.
We are not witnessing a shift from a national to a postnational mode of
membership politics, and still less a shift from a state-centered to a non-
state mode of organizing migration and membership. We see, rather, an
expansion and strengthening of states’ ties to transborder populations and
of transborder populations’ claims on “homeland” states, both legitimated
in the language of nationalism.
Ways of construing the conceptual model of the nation-state, however,
are changing. The various idealized congruencies I have highlighted—
between the boundaries of the state and those of the nation, between pol-
ity and culture, between long-term residence and full membership, and
between cultural nationality and legal citizenship—are not all of a piece.
144 M i g r at i o n , Me mb e rs h i p, a n d th e Natio n- State
They can be prioritized and interpreted in different ways. The recent wave
of external membership policies reflects a shift to a less territorialized way
of interpreting these congruencies. Congruence between state and nation,
for example, can mean that the territorial frontiers of the state should
match the (imagined) territorial boundaries of the nation. In interwar Eu-
rope, this territorial interpretation of congruence generated powerfully de-
stabilizing irredentist claims. But congruence between state and nation can
be given a different interpretation, one that extends the reach of the polity
to embrace transborder members of the nation who do not reside within
the territory of the state. This interpretation, rather than the territorial one,
has informed most recent forms of external membership politics.
In this regard, the transnationalism and postnationalism literatures are
correct to stress the diminished significance of territoriality. The point
should not be overstated: the nation-state remains fundamentally a territo-
rial organization. But it is also a membership association (Brubaker 1992:
22–23), and the frontiers of membership increasingly extend beyond the
territorial borders of the state. These new forms of external membership,
however, are neither trans-state nor transnational; as forms of transborder
nationalism, they represent an extension and adaptation of the nation-state
model, not its transcendence.
chapter seven
Nationalism, Ethnicity,
and Modernity
political programs are not “traditional” in any useful analytic sense but are
best understood as distinctively modern, at least in certain respects.
But by what criteria are expressly antimodern cultural and political pro-
grams or social movements characterized as distinctively modern? The an-
swer given by Shmuel Eisenstadt, the most persuasive proponent of the
multiple modernities thesis, goes something like this: Putatively antimod-
ern programs and movements are in fact characteristically modern in three
ways. They are modern, first, in their reflexivity, that is, in their sense of a
range of alternative social and political possibilities that can be realized
“through autonomous human agency.”3 Second, such programs and move-
ments are modern in their “highly political and ideological” character, in
their modalities of protest and institution building. Third, they are modern
in their “Jacobinism,” by which Eisenstadt means their commitment to the
“total reconstruction of personality, [and] of individual and collective
identities, [through] conscious . . . political action” (2000: 3, 19, 21).
This is certainly an interesting argument. But it is also paradoxical:
Eisenstadt appeals to an understanding of a single modernity in order to
validate his argument about multiple modernities. On one level, there are
multiple modernities; on another, more fundamental and abstract level,
there is only one. The notion of a single modernity would seem to be
more fundamental analytically, for this is what allows Eisenstadt to char-
acterize a wide range of institutional patterns and cultural and political
models, programs, and movements—even avowedly antimodern ones—as
“modern.”4
Eisenstadt himself does not always seem fully comfortable with the lan-
guage of “multiple modernities,” and there are suggestions in his work of an
alternative analytical language. He writes, for example, of the “continual
reinterpretation of the cultural program of modernity.” In this alternative
idiom, modernity is understood as a singular phenomenon, though it is of
course subject to continual contestation and reinterpretation. And much of
this contestation involves challenges to Western models, programs, and in-
stitutional patterns. As Eisenstadt says, such challenges seek to deprive the
West “of its monopoly on modernity” (2000: 24).
I will adopt this alternative language. I want to consider nationalism
and politicized ethnicity as characteristically modern phenomena. As is
evident to any student of the subject, these phenomena display no single
pattern but rather multiple configurations, patterns, and programs. Yet I
want to treat nationalism and politicized ethnicity as manifestations of
modernity understood as a singular historical phenomenon, though
one that is dynamically changing and, of course, subject to chronic
contestation.
148 N at i o n a l i sm, E t hn i c i t y, a nd Mo d ernity
early work includes his major contribution to the analysis of ethnicity and
nationalism, namely the long essay “The Integrative Revolution” that ap-
peared in the 1963 volume he edited, entitled Old Societies and New
States, with the characteristic subtitle The Quest for Modernity in Asia
and Africa.
When this essay is cited today, it is usually in connection with discus-
sions of “primordialism.” Criticizing primordialist accounts of ethnicity from
a constructivist, circumstantialist, or instrumentalist point of view has been
something of a minor industry in the past few decades. The problem with
such critiques is not that they are wrong; it is that they are too obviously
right to be interesting and that they have no serious target. Such critiques
often cite Geertz’s essay as an example of a primordialist account. This is no
doubt because he described the modernizing postcolonial state—in his in-
imitable language—as roiling the parapolitical vortices of primordial sen-
timents (1963: 126–127). For many readers today, this language may sug-
gest a crude dichotomy between the rational, civil modernizing state and
the “vortices” of irrational, traditional primordial attachments. But Geertz’s
analysis is far more interesting and subtle than this.
Geertz’s account of politicized ethnicity was anything but primordialist.
By “primordial attachments,” he meant ties that are assumed (in vernacu-
lar understandings) to be natural, prepolitical, and unalterable, or ties that
are represented as such in vernacular discourse. He did not himself treat
such ties as natural, prepolitical, or unalterable. In fact his own analysis
showed that such attachments were being rearticulated and aggregated in
postcolonial states into larger, more diffuse ethnic blocs, constructed along
the lines of region, race, language, or religion, and stretched, as it were, to
fit the scale of the state as a whole. The resulting structure of ethnic attach-
ments, with its simplified and concentrated patterning of statewide group
antagonisms, was in no sense the residue of “tradition.” As Geertz empha-
sized, it was a product of modernity—a response to the structure and scale
of political life in postcolonial polities (1963: 155). Far from seeing ethnic-
ity as primordial or vestigial, or as destined to fade into merely private
relevance, Geertz saw politicized ethnicity as intensifying precisely under
modern political conditions.
Nor can Geertz be said to have drastically overestimated the power of
the modern state to elicit loyalty, instill solidarity, and reshape identities.
The “integrative revolution” to which his title alludes does not refer to
“national integration” as envisioned by nationalist elites—or by less so-
phisticated modernization theorists; it does not project an end-state of
successful or complete “national integration.” Geertz was even more sensi-
tive than Deutsch to the complexities and difficulties besetting nation-
N at i on a l i s m, E t hn i c i t y, a n d Mo d ernity 151
ways of identifying self and other, and as elementary templates for making
claims.
Socioeconomic processes include the social mobilization and changing
division of labor described by Deutsch and Gellner. Political processes in-
clude the diffusion of a new kind of polity and a cluster of associated ideas
that I will describe in a moment. Cultural processes include those I men-
tioned earlier in my discussion of Eisenstadt: the development of a new
reflexivity, an expanded understanding of autonomous human agency, and
an enlarged sense of the possibilities of social change through political ac-
tion. To emphasize the global nature of these processes is not to posit their
uniformity; it is to underscore their scale, scope, and interconnectedness.
The second advantage of a “single modernity” perspective is that it high-
lights the diffusion of a set of organizational forms and political-cultural
templates that provide the more immediate institutional and cultural ma-
terials for various forms of nationalism and politicized ethnicity. The no-
tion of diffusion was central to midcentury modernization theory, and it
has fallen into a certain disrepute. It is easy to criticize certain forms of
modernization theory for their naïve and teleological understanding of the
diffusion of a Western model of a civic, secular nation-state. But this does
not mean we should dispense with the notion of diffusion altogether. Dif-
fusion does indeed occur, though what is diffused and how diffusion works
need to be better specified.
The language of nationalism was from the beginning an internationally
circulating discourse. This does not mean it was mechanically copied from
one setting to another. As it was taken up in new settings, it was adapted
to local circumstances and struggles, translated into idioms with specific lo-
cal resonances, and blended with various indigenous discursive traditions
(Anderson 1991; Chatterjee 1986; Calhoun 1997: 107). Still, the linked
ideas, ideals, and organizational models of nation, state, citizenship, and
popular sovereignty form a kind of package. This package has a certain com-
mon core, underlying the varying adaptations, appropriations, and trans-
formations. And one can speak of the global diffusion of this “package” in
the two centuries following the French Revolution.
The package has an organizational and institutional component and a
cultural and ideological component. The organizational component in-
cludes the basic form of the bureaucratic territorial state. Of course there
is a great range of variation in the form of contemporary states. But in
longer term historical perspective, what is striking is the global diffusion
of one broad type of polity—the relatively centralized and intrusive territo-
rial state, exercising direct rather than indirect rule and governing through
what Weber called legal authority with a bureaucratic administrative
N at i on a l i s m, E t hn i c i t y, a n d Mo d ernity 153
staff—at the expense of many other types of polities. Also striking in lon-
ger term perspective is the convergence—across a wide range of variation
in state size, efficacy, and regime type—in domains of state activity: almost
all contemporary states assume at least nominal responsibility for such
matters as education, health, social welfare, dispute resolution, the regula-
tion of economic life, and so on (Meyer 1987).
The cultural or ideological component—analyzed from a different angle
in Chapter 6—includes the linked ideas of peoplehood, nationhood, and
citizenship. Those over whom a state rules are understood not as subjects
but—at least potentially—as active citizens. These citizens are understood
to constitute a coherent collectivity, a “people” or nation. This people or
nation is understood as relatively homogeneous and as possessing a dis-
tinct unity, identity, or character. Finally, state authority is legitimated by
some kind of reference to the sovereignty or “ownership” of “the people”
or “the nation”: the state is understood as the state of and for a particular
“nation.”
This language of peoplehood, nationhood, and citizenship is extremely
flexible and adaptable. It can be used by states but also against them. It can
be used to legitimize a polity but also to challenge its legitimacy, to demand
a new polity, or to claim autonomy or resources. And the content of the
idea of peoplehood or nationhood—that which gives a people or nation its
unity, its character, its particular and distinctive identity—can be specified
in various ways. It may be understood as shaped by the state and by shared
political experience, or it may be understood as prepolitical, existing prior
to and independently of the state. It may be understood as grounded in
citizenship, history, language, way of life, descent, race, or religion.
On this account, we do not need the notion of “multiple modernities” to
make sense of ethnic or religious nationalisms; a single modernity perspec-
tive can do just as well. The question becomes not “How many moderni-
ties?” but how to characterize modernity per se. If we work with an out-
moded, narrow, complacently Eurocentric account of modernity, then the
notion of multiple modernity may be compelling. But if “modernity” is
characterized in a more supple and sophisticated manner—and there is a
substantial literature that does just this—then the case for a multiple mo-
dernities perspective weakens considerably.
What does this mean in the domain of nationalism and ethnicity? If we
work with an outmoded understanding of the modern nation-state and
modern nationalism as purely secular and civic, with religion and ethnicity
confined to the private realm, then a multiple modernities perspective may
be compelling. But as I suggested in reviewing the work of Deutsch, Gell-
ner, and Geertz, this narrow understanding was by no means the only one
154 N at i o n a l i sm, E t hn i c i t y, a nd Mo d ernity
available even in the 1960s, let alone today. A more supple understanding
of political modernity has long been available (see for example Wimmer
2002). This understanding allows for the flexible adaptability and chronic
contestation of internationally circulating models of state, nation, people,
and citizenship.
This chapter has advanced two arguments for a “single modernity” per-
spective, one logical, the other sociological. The logical argument is this: in
order to characterize multiple institutional patterns and cultural and po-
litical programs, even ostensibly antimodern ones, as “modern,” we need
some criterion; this criterion depends—at least at an abstract conceptual
level—on a single notion of modernity.
The sociological argument is twofold: it emphasizes the globally inter-
connected socioeconomic, political, and cultural processes that have gen-
erated and sustained nationalism and politicized ethnicity as basic forms
of cultural and political understanding, identification, and claims-making;
and it emphasizes both the common core and the flexible adaptability of
the package of ideas and organizational models of state, nation, people,
and citizenship that has diffused worldwide in the past two centuries.
Notes
References
Index
Notes
Introduction
1. White House, “Remarks by the President on Economic Mobility,” December
4, 2013, http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2013/12/04/remarks-presi
dent-economic-mobility.
2. Wide-ranging recent accounts include Noah 2012; Hacker and Pierson 2010;
Stiglitz 2012; Grusky 2012; Saez 2013; Jenkins and Micklewright 2007; Neck-
erman and Torche 2007; Wilkinson and Pickett 2009; Weeden and Grusky 2012;
DiMaggio and Garip 2012.
3. Fraser (1995) offered an influential early diagnosis of this shift.
4. See, for example, Wimmer 2013; Lamont et al. 2014; Emirbayer and Desmond
forthcoming. Not coincidentally, Bourdieu is an important inspiration for all
three works; on Bourdieu see Wacquant 2013.
collaborator, Thomas Piketty (2014), has analyzed the “return of the rentier”
(Milanovic 2014) in advanced capitalist economies.
2. The distinction between internal and external categories is relative (Tilly 1998:
77). Citizenship, for example, is an internal category with respect to the state as
a whole insofar as it is an internal position or status defined by the state as an
organization. But it is at the same time an external category with respect to par-
ticular organizations or programs that are nested within or financed by the
state, in the sense that it is taken by those organizations and programs as given
and predefined. Citizenship is of course also an external category outside the
sphere of the state.
3. Exploitation and opportunity hoarding, Tilly writes, “establish” categorical ine-
quality; two further mechanisms, emulation and adaptation, which I do not
consider here, work to “cement” such arrangements (1998: 10).
4. Tilly is of course aware of the complexities of the system of racial classification
under apartheid. But he argues that the workings of multicategorical systems of
classification can be resolved analytically into the workings of categorical pairs
(1998: 7).
5. It is therefore puzzling, as Mann (1999: 29) has observed about the book, that
while “we clearly see ethnicity, race, and gender—and many occupational
categories— . . . we only dimly glimpse capitalism.” This is indeed, as Mann sug-
gested, “quite an omission,” particularly since Tilly (1998: 38) was moved to
write the book by his belief that “the intensity of capitalist inequality causes
unnecessary suffering.”
6. This reflects differences in the resources involved. The resource controlled by
insiders in the case of exploitation is a “labor-demanding resource, from which
they can extract returns only by harnessing the effort of others” (Tilly 1998:
86–87); the resource controlled by insiders in the case of opportunity hoarding
can be enjoyed without mobilizing the labor of others.
7. On the “anticategorical imperative” that informs network analysis, see Emir-
bayer and Goodwin 1994: 1414. Networks are almost always homophilous in
one respect or another (McPherson et al. 2001), and networks that are ho-
mophilous with respect to individual-level characteristics associated with the
adoption of welfare-enhancing practices can exacerbate original levels of ine-
quality when (via externalities, social learning, or normative influence) the net-
works affect the likelihood of adopting the practice (DiMaggio and Garip
2012). The network-mediated, inequality-amplifying processes reviewed by
DiMaggio and Garip do not require categorically bounded networks, exclusion,
or opportunity hoarding; they do not depend on a boundary between insiders
who control a valuable resource and outsiders who do not. However, high de-
grees of homophily—insofar as they go well beyond baseline levels of homophily
attributable to opportunity structures such as differential group size (McPherson
et al. 2001)—can be understood as shading over into categorical closure. This
suggests a way of connecting Tilly’s methodologically structuralist line of argu-
ment with the generally methodologically individualist research reviewed by
DiMaggio and Garip (2012).
8. I borrow here a phrase used by Epstein (2007: 255) in a different context.
N ot e s to P ag e s 1 9 –21 159
34. I discuss religion here since it is both a component of ethnicity, a key part of
the cultural content of many ethnic identifications, and an analogue of ethnic-
ity (in that many forms of religion, like ethnicity, are socially understood as
basic sources and forms of social, cultural, and political identification that sort
people into distinct, bounded, and largely self-reproducing “communities”).
See Chapter 4 of this volume for an extended discussion. A sustained compari-
son of linguistic and religious pluralism as forms of difference and sources of
inequality is found in Brubaker (forthcoming).
35. On moves in liberal states toward a more neutral and even-handed stance to-
ward religion and the limits of such moves, see the discussion in Chapter 3.
36. See, for example, Portes and Zhou 1993: 86, 90. Such strategies of insulation
seek to keep children out of certain undesired networks and to embed them in
alternative, preferred, more surveyable networks formed by ethnic churches, lan-
guage schools, camps, and so on. The promotion of more or less arranged mar-
riages with home-country spouses also belongs to such strategies of insulation.
37. Private clubs are a legal gray area. Here too the sphere of the indisputably
private has been shrinking. The Supreme Court ruled in two cases from the
1980s that clubs such as the Jaycees and Rotary were too large and effectively
public to be able to exclude women by claiming a right of private association.
Clubs for women or members of minority groups are in a stronger legal posi-
tion (Buss 1989).
38. This can lead in certain circumstances to something approximating wholesale
categorical exclusion. Bielby and Baron (1986: 760–761), for example, show
that extreme levels of occupational sex segregation can be generated by a sim-
ple model in which costs of employee turnover are high, employers perceive
women as more likely to quit, and information about individual propensity to
quit is unavailable.
39. In legal and organizational environments in which hiring, promotion, and fir-
ing practices are closely monitored, in which organizations are under pressure to
hire or promote minorities or women, and in which the costs of discrimination—
or of the appearance of discrimination—can be substantial, the skewing can
sometimes favor members of generally disadvantaged categories (Petersen and
Saporta 2004: 886).
40. Even when these between-group inequalities are much smaller than within-
group inequalities, they may translate into substantial between-group inequal-
ities in representation in particularly desirable or undesirable positions. One
reason for this is that even when group-specific distributions (for example, of
skills, education, or experience) substantially overlap, there is likely to be much
less overlap at the tail ends of the distributions.
41. See, for example, Lareau 2003. On the need for an integrated understanding
of the cultural, structural, and social psychological dimensions of unequal en-
vironments, with special reference to race, see Emirbayer and Desmond (forth-
coming); on the recent renewal of interest in culture on the part of students of
poverty, see Small et al. (2010). See also Lamont et al. (2014) for a theoriza-
tion of the role of cultural processes in the production of inequality.
N ot e s to P ag e s 3 9 –48 163
42. This is a theme developed throughout Bourdieu’s oeuvre; among many other
discussions, see those in Pascalian Meditations (2000: 169ff) and Masculine
Domination (2001: 22–42). There is a risk, to be sure—of which Bourdieu
was well aware—of overemphasizing internalization and its contribution to
social and cultural reproduction.
43. For an interesting attempt to bring a psychoanalytically informed extension of
Bourdieu’s notion of symbolic violence to bear on racial inequality in the
United States, see Emirbayer and Desmond forthcoming: chapter 6.
44. On positional inequality—the inequality inscribed in the structure of social
positions, irrespective of the characteristics of the persons who occupy them—
see Baron and Bielby 1980; Kalleberg and Griffin 1980. On the distinction
between positional inequality and status inequality (inequality between kinds
of people) in the domain of gender, see Jackson 1998.
45. On the social distribution of honor as an aspect of the distribution of power,
the discussion of Weber ([1922] 1978: 926–938) remains foundational.
46. On race, see Emirbayer and Desmond forthcoming: chapter 6.
47. In some contexts, however, categories of personhood are themselves mediated
by social position. In much of Latin America, for example, racial or color cat-
egory membership depends on social position, in accordance with the expres-
sion “money whitens.”
48. This is an instance of a broader dialectic of internalization and externalization
that is a central theme in Bourdieu’s work.
49. As I suggested in my discussion of categorically inflected selection processes,
there are various intermediate possibilities in which category membership per
se matters without being the only thing that matters.
50. This is obviously far too sweeping. Given the many relevant axes of categori-
cal difference and the fact that most axes involve multiple socially significant
categories and categorical pairs, any hypothesis designed to inform research
would have to specify which categorical differences have become less inegali-
tarian. (On the importance of categorical pairs, even in systems involving mul-
tiple categories, see Tilly 1998: 6–7.) In the U.S. context, for example, even as
most ethnic and religious categorical differences have become less inegalitar-
ian, the categorical distinction between black and non-black has remained a
crucial and refractory focus of inequality. I have discussed some reasons for
these differing trajectories. Saperstein and Penner (2012: 676) suggest, in addi-
tion, that the patterned microlevel fluidity of racial identification and classifi-
cation reinforces entrenched black–non-black inequalities “by redefining suc-
cessful or high-status people as white (or not black) and unsuccessful or
low-status people as black (or not white).”
differs from that of Mills (1998) and Kaplan and Winther (2012)—is broadly
Bourdieusian in its emphasis on the “objectivity of the subjective” and the re-
sultant facticity, externality, and constraint. Kaplan and Winther treat con-
structivism as a form of objectivism, whereas I use constructivism and subjec-
tivism more or less interchangeably.
2. See the classic account of institutionalization in Berger and Luckman 1966.
3. Another influential discussion defines race as “the framework of ranked catego-
ries segmenting the human population that was developed by western Europe-
ans following their global expansion beginning in the 1400s” (Sanjek 1996: 1).
4. Objectivist understandings of ethnicity, too, have been in retreat since the semi-
nal work of Barth (1969). But the subjectivist turn has proceeded somewhat
differently in the domain of ethnicity. Because objectivist understandings of eth-
nic groups as entities in the world can be grounded in culture rather than nature,
they do not carry the same baggage as objectivist understandings of races. And
the question “What is an ethnic group?” continues to be asked. Yet culturalist
forms of objectivism were powerfully challenged by Barth. Ethnic boundaries,
he argued, do not exist objectively by virtue of shared traits or common culture.
Rather, boundaries are the precipitate of practices of classification and categori-
zation, which select certain cultural traits as diacritical and ignore others. One
implication of this is that ethnic boundaries can persist even when objective
cultural differences diminish or disappear. The critique of objectivist under-
standings of ethnicity, with antecedents in the characteristically dense and rich
pages Max Weber devoted to the subject ([1922] 1978: 385–398), has been de-
veloped by Jenkins 1997; Brubaker 2004; Wimmer 2013; and others.
5. By contrast, earlier appeals to biology to validate the claim (in the first UNESCO
“Statement on Race” from 1950) that race was less a biological phenomenon
than a social myth, or that science had demonstrated the equality of human
races, were criticized by geneticists: see Provine 1986: 873, 874.
6. See Barkan 1992 for a parallel argument about interwar Britain.
7. “The Race Question,” http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0012/001282/128291eo
.pdf. As Reardon (2005: 39–43) has observed, the statement did not deny the
biological reality of race. But while it noted ways in which race could legiti-
mately be understood as a biological phenomenon, it pointed out that these
did not correspond to prevailing folk understandings of race, and it urged that
the term race be dropped in favor of ethnic groups.
8. I draw loosely here on Abbott’s (1988) account of the system of professions as
an ecology of jurisdictional claims.
9. Biologists were in effect “licensed” to study variation precisely insofar as they
were understood as not making any claims about race.
10. This is an exaggeration, to be sure. As I discuss in the next section, race remained
a key focus of objectivist inquiry in epidemiological and biomedical research.
11. Human Genome Project Information Archive, retrieved November 22, 2012,
http:// www.ornl .gov /sci /techresources /Human _Genome /project /clinton2
.shtml.
12. This move has been noted by many commentators; see, for example, El-Haj
2007; Koenig et al. 2008; Whitmarsh and Jones 2010; Omi 2010; Bliss 2012.
N ot e s to P ag e s 5 2 –60 165
13. Differences between conventional continental race categories account for be-
tween 3 and 10 percent of the total variation, depending on measures and
samples (Feldman and Lewontin 2008: 93–95, updating Lewontin’s classic
[1972] work on this topic).
14. Hochschild et al. 2012 is an important exception.
15. These new NIH and FDA rules were part of a broader institutionalization of race
in an inclusionary mode that involved the establishment of offices of women’s
and minority health in various federal agencies (Epstein 2007: 75, 126–127).
16. As Feldman and Lewontin (2008: 93) point out, however, knowing a person’s
ancestry “only slightly improves the ability to predict his or her genotype.”
17. From another perspective, controlling for covariates can be seen as an inap-
propriate form of “over-control,” in that “race is not confounded by the other
variables, [but] is antecedent to them” (Cooper and David 1986: 111; see also
Morgenstern 1997: 609).
18. OMB, Revisions to the Standards for the Classification of Federal Data on
Race and Ethnicity, http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/fedreg_1997standards;
Kahn 2006: 1966; Lee and Skrentny 2010: 629.
19. Categorical alignment operates on the reception side as well. A survey experi-
ment found that those exposed to a news story reporting a genetic variant
more strongly linked to heart attacks in blacks than in whites were more likely
to endorse broader views about essential differences between racial groups
(Phelan et al. 2013), providing support for Duster’s (2003) argument about a
spillover of racial objectivism from biomedical to other domains.
20. There is a large literature on BiDil. My account is based primarily on Kahn
2004, 2005, 2013.
21. For a defense of the FDA decision to approve BiDil specifically for African
American patients, see Temple and Stockbridge 2007; this defense is itself crit-
icized in Ellison et al. 2008.
22. Since variants negatively influencing drug response (unlike many variants predis-
posing to disease) would not have been selected against in most environments,
such variants may be fairly common. This has led some (Goldstein et al. 2003:
946) to argue that advances in genomics are likely to have a more immediate
payoff in pharmacogenetics than in understanding the causes of disease.
23. This individualizing and deracializing outcome would be more likely if the dif-
ference in allele frequencies between socially defined racial categories were rela-
tively small. A disease-predisposing genetic variant found in substantially higher
frequency among a disadvantaged socially defined racial category, however,
would have the potential to stigmatize the entire category, and to stigmatize the
disease by associating it with the stigmatized category. As I note in the next sec-
tion, this potential for stigmatizing an entire category by virtue of its association
with a genetic variant linked to an undesirable outcome is even greater in the
case of behavioral genetic studies that seek to identify possible genetic factors
underlying dispositions or traits linked to behavioral outcomes such as delin-
quency or crime.
24. Racialization is an instance of what Epstein (2007: chapter 7) calls “niche
standardization.”
166 N o t e s to P ag e s 6 1–64
nental, Southeast Asian, and Middle Eastern (Williams and Johnson 2008: 69;
Koops and Schellekens 2008: 172–173).
34. This is already being done for certain eye and hair colors.
35. Fox (2010) argues that molecular photofitting—which seeks to statistically
match the biogeographic ancestry of an unknown suspect against a database of
known individuals that includes biogeographic ancestry along with photo-
graphs and physical facial measurements in order to generate a range of facial
images most likely to approximate that of the suspect (Frudakis 2008)—will
work in this deracializing direction. His argument would apply a fortiori to
direct forensic DNA phenotyping.
36. To be sure, predicted light skin—like estimates of predominantly European bio-
geographic ancestry—may in certain contexts help reorient investigations away
from marked or minority populations. M’Charek (2008: 400) discusses a sexual
assault and murder case in which an analysis suggesting that the perpetrator had
predominantly European ancestry deflected the investigation away from the
previously suspected residents of a center for asylum seekers in a Dutch village.
37. This is a large subject in its own right, and I can touch on it only briefly here.
For a review of behavioral genetic research on antisocial behavior, see Baker
et al. 2006. On analytic strategies by which sociology can take account of
the “ubiquitous partial heritability” of individual-level outcomes, see Freese
2008. On the potential of behavioral genetic research to stigmatize racial and
ethnic minorities in criminal justice contexts, see Rothenberg and Wang 2006.
For a Bourdieusian account of the development of the field of behavioral gene-
tics, see Panofsky 2014. For an argument that a recent paradigm shift in genetics
has challenged the assumptions underlying the heritability and gene associa-
tion studies that have been at the core of behavioral genetics, see Charney
2012; see also Charney and English 2012.
38. As ancestry testing has merged with social networking, and as finer-grained
DNA testing has converged with nongenetic genealogy, the major companies
have been seeking to expand their customer base so as to increase the proba-
bility that users will find genetic “matches”—more or less distant relatives—
among other users. Pursuit of the self-reinforcing benefits of an expanding
network may explain the aggressive pricing practices and the consolidation of
the industry in the past few years. (As of late 2013, the prices offered by the
major companies—especially for autosomal tests—were substantially lower
than those reported by Greely [2008] and Wagner et al. [2012]). Precise figures
on the number of those tested are unavailable, but estimates suggest that well
over a million people have purchased ancestry tests (Tallbear 2013b:68;
Wagner et al. 2012: 586). One leading company alone, 23andMe, claimed to
have over 400,000 users in its database (http://www.isogg.org/wiki/Autosomal
_DNA_testing_comparison_chart) and lowered the price of its test to $99
in December 2012 in an effort to expand the database to 1 million (http://blog
.23andme .com /news /one -million -strong -a -note -from -23andmes -anne
-wojcicki/). In the context of preexisting American fascination with geneal-
ogy (Bolnick 2003) and favorable public attitudes toward ancestry testing
168 N o t e s to P ag e s 7 0–71
various caveats: “There is no test for racial identification. Race is a social con-
struct, not genetically determined. Similarly, ethnicity is more cultural than
biological.” “Frequently Asked Questions,” http://www.africanancestry.com
/faq/ (retrieved July 8, 2014).
46. Forms of affiliation with African countries and ethnic groups on the part of
African Americans and other Afro-descendant populations are by no means
restricted to those who have taken genetic ancestry tests. On the broader phe-
nomenon of African “homecoming” and the ambivalence it often entails, see
Schramm 2010.
47. African Ancestry, “PatriClan Test Kit,” http://shop.africanancestry.com/Patri
Clan-Test-Kit-p/pc001.htm (retrieved July 8, 2014). To reinforce the dis-
claimer, the following appeared in red italics after an asterisk at the bottom of
an earlier version of the same web page, just above where one had to click to
buy the test: “Being African American does not guarantee an African result.”
For those seeking African roots, the maternal line is more likely to yield re-
sults. The MatriClan test includes a parallel disclaimer, but for women only 8
percent of results do not point to an African ancestor. On the privileging of the
maternal line in tests of African ancestry, see also Schramm 2012: 177–178.
48. Y-chromosome DNA tests are also used in various “surname projects” that seek
to trace distinctive male lineages. For an account of such projects in the context
of the Irish diaspora, see Nash 2008: chapter 7. Such projects, like others that
use Y-chromosome and mitochondrial DNA tests, suggest “that a man can have
only one genetic ancestry” (260).
49. 23andMe, “Ancestry Composition Basics,” https://customercare.23andme
.com/entries/22549561-Ancestry-Composition-Basics (retrieved December
6, 2013).
50. Ancestry.com, “Viewing Genetic Ethnicity Results from AncestryDNA,” http://help
.ancestry.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/5475 (retrieved December 6, 2013).
51. 23andMe, “Reference Populations in Ancestry Composition,” https://customer
care.23andme.com/entries/22584878-Reference-populations-in-Ancestry-Com
position (retrieved December 6, 2013).
52. iGENEA, “Are You a Viking” and “Are You Jewish?”, http://www.igenea.com
/en/vikings, http://www.igenea.com/en/jews (retrieved December 6, 2013).
53. Research on the social effects of genetic genealogy is just beginning, but it is
worth noting that an initial survey of those who had actually taken ancestry
tests found that—contrary to media analysis and a survey using vignettes re-
ported by the same authors—tests contributed more to blurring than to sharp-
ening racial boundaries (Hochschild and Sen 2012).
54. This and the following four paragraphs draw primarily on Tallbear 2013b.
55. This can happen as a result of generations of intermarriage between members
of different tribes, and between Native Americans and others, both of which
are quite common. With every passing generation, a larger fraction of children
of intermarried parents cannot meet tribal blood quantum requirements (Tall-
bear 2013b: 98).
56. For the “racial shifters” discussed by Sturm (2011: 54–57), for example,
Cherokeeness offered an enticing alternative to a white identity experienced
170 N o t e s to P ag e s 7 7–81
65. For a different take on this challenge and how social scientists might respond,
see Shiao et al. 2012.
66. Nor does it mean that there are no significant cultural (or genetic) differences
between socially defined ethnic categories. For reasons of expository clarity, I
focus on race, though the broader argument applies to ethnicity as well.
67. As noted earlier, moreover, the discovery of genetically based differences be-
tween socially defined racial categories in disease susceptibility or drug re-
sponse might even make racial categories less rather than more significant in
medical practice. Identification of the actual casually significant genetic vari-
ants would permit testing patients directly for those variants rather than using
socially defined racial categories as a crude proxy.
68. Sensitive to this difference, some biomedical researchers have sought to substi-
tute direct measures of ancestry for racial and ethnic categories. But as Fu-
jimura et al. (2010) show, there is often some slippage between these notions.
69. Socially defined racial and ethnic categories (along with religious and other
social categories) are also causally related to biogeographic and biogenetic
ancestry, insofar as shared understandings about boundaries and belonging,
and the practices of social closure that are informed by such understand-
ings, shape patterns of sexual relations. Such shared understandings and
practices of social closure can preserve or even augment or create biogenetic
differences. But as they change, they can also contribute to the erosion of
such differences.
70. The sharpness of categorical boundaries is of course variable. Categories are
generally more blurred and ambiguous in everyday life than in administrative
practice. And the proliferation of intermediate racial categories in some
settings—notably in Latin America—is well known. The increasing use of “mixed
race” as a category in the United States and elsewhere, in formal as well as
informal settings, is interesting as a kind of performative contradiction that at
once denies and reinforces categorical distinctions.
71. The notion of biosocial processes goes back at least to Rabinow (1992). It has
come much later to sociology, invested as the discipline has been in defining
itself against psychology and biology. But that has begun to change in recent
years (Freese 2008; Shiao et al. 2012). For a constructivist analysis of the bio-
social processes involved in the geneticization, diagnostic expansion, increas-
ing incidence, and increasing genetic heterogeneity of autism, see Navon and
Eyal (2014).
example, Glynn 2002). Intensified religiosity may be highly visible, but there is
no evidence that it is broadly representative. Quantitative studies have reported
intergenerational stability in levels of religiosity (Diehl and Koenig 2009, exam-
ining Germany), or slight intergenerational declines (Ersanilli and Koopmans
2009, considering Germany, France, and the Netherlands). Kashyap and Lewis
(2013), interestingly, find both decreased observance among younger British
Muslims and an increased salience of Islam for personal identity.
14. This point was already made by Herberg (1960) and has more recently been
emphasized by Warner (1993) and Kurien (1998); but see critically Jeung et al.
(2012).
15. In many of these cases, however (in India, Switzerland, Belgium, and Canada,
at least with respect to Quebec, for example), linguistic pluralism on the state-
wide level coincides with linguistic monism—or at least with the strongly in-
stitutionalized primacy of a single language—at the level of federal component
states or provinces. Linguistic pluralism, in other words, generally exists as a
collection of lower-level linguistic monisms. This observation supports the ar-
gument of Zolberg and Long that modern states (or at least their component
substate polities) tend toward monism in the domain of language. The organi-
zation of religious pluralism in liberal states is striking different; it is not ter-
ritorialized the way linguistic pluralism tends to be.
16. Political theorists are divided about the justice of this sharp difference in the
treatment of long-established and recently imported linguistic pluralism; see,
for example, Kymlicka 1995; Patten 2006.
17. I borrow the term deep diversity from a line of work in political theory (see,
for example, Galston 1995) that derives most immediately from Rawls’s Po-
litical Liberalism (1993).
18. Deprivatization and ongoing privatization are not mutually exclusive; given
the complexity of the contemporary religious landscape, it is not surprising
that both are happening at the same time (Casanova 2009: 29).
19. To underscore the relative normative and cultural “thinness” of language vis-
à-vis religion is not to deny that language may carry “thicker” cultural mean-
ings and commitments in some contexts than in others. See Carens (2000:
128–129) and Bauböck (2002: 177–178) on “thin” and “thick” theories of
language in relation to cultural commitments.
20. The meanings of and boundaries between “public” and “private,” to be sure,
are richly ambiguous and chronically contested (Casanova 1994: chapter 2).
15. This point was noted by Cohen, who preserves three homeland-related criteria
in his own enumeration of nine “common features of a diaspora” (1997: 23, 26).
16. A further complexity arises in the case of what might be called “second-order
diasporas,” when more than one potential “homeland” or place of origin is in
play. Cohen (1992) has described Caribbeans in North America and Europe as
a diaspora of a diaspora. Should a three-stage migration sequence then lead us
to speak of a third-order diaspora—a diaspora of a diaspora of a diaspora? And
what if the final stage—whether stage two or stage three—leads back to the
original homeland? Does this cancel the diasporic condition, or does it com-
plexify it further? What is the homeland, or homelands, of the descendants of
German-speaking populations who settled along the Volga as colonists during
the eighteenth century, who were deported to Kazakhstan and elsewhere in
1941 after the German invasion of the Soviet Union, and who resettled in Ger-
many as Aussielder in the 1990s? What is the homeland, or homelands, of the
late Soviet and post-Soviet Jews who resettled en masse in Israel? Of Transylva-
nian Hungarians who have moved to Hungary? Of Korean Chinese who have
settled in South Korea, or Brazilian Japanese who have migrated to Japan? In
these and similar cases, the putative coethnics are often marked and sometimes
even stigmatized as different, and the putative homeland is often experienced as
alien. On ethnic return migration, see Brubaker 1998; Tsuda 2009.
17. On the temporal dimension, see Marienstras 1989: 125; Cohen 1997:
185–186.
18. On methodological nationalism, see Wimmer and Glick Schiller 2003. Although
she does not use the term, Soysal (2000) makes a partially similar argument.
19. For related articles about a fundamental shift in perspective, see Glick Schiller
et al. 1995; Kearney 1995; Beck 2000.
20. Natan Sznaider, opening remarks to the conference Diaspora Today, Schloss
Elmau, Germany, July 17, 2003.
21. For a critique of the view that states have lost their ability to control their
borders, see Brubaker 1994; Freeman 1994; and, for a more detailed account,
Zolberg 1999. On the mid-nineteenth-century codification of citizenship as a
means of controlling migration, see Brubaker 1992: 64ff. On the historical
development of passports and related techniques of identification, see Torpey
2000 and the studies collected in Caplan and Torpey 2001.
22. On the nation-state as an idealized conceptual model, see Chapter 6.
23. For a nuanced argument about “cosmopolitics” as a mode of “thinking and
feeling beyond the nation” that does not treat the nation-state and cosmopoli-
tanism as antithetical, see Robbins 1998. David Hollinger has also argued elo-
quently that the “nation” need not be antithetical to cosmopolitan or transna-
tional engagements but can sometimes mediate effectively “between the ethnos
and the species” (1998: 87; see also 1995: chapter 6).
24. Among “historical diasporas,” the “real numbers” supplied by Sheffer yield
35 million for the Chinese diaspora, 9 million for the Indian diaspora, 8 mil-
lion for the Jewish and Gypsy diasporas, 5.5 million for the Armenian dias-
pora, 4 million for the Greek diaspora, 2.5 million for the German diaspora,
178 N ot e s to P ag e s 1 2 8–131
and 1 million for the Druze diaspora. Among “modern” diasporas, the African
American diaspora numbers 25 million, the Kurdish diaspora 14 million, the
Irish diaspora 10 million, the Italian diaspora 8 million, the Hungarian and
Polish diasporas 4.5 million each, the Turkish and Iranian diasporas 3.5 mil-
lion each, the Japanese diaspora 3 million, the Lebanese (Christian) diaspora
2.5 million, and the “Black Atlantic” diaspora 1.5 million. A similar list with
numbers is given for thirty “incipient diasporas” (Sheffer 2003: 104–106).
25. For an argument that discussions of identity are similarly bedeviled by a mix
of strong and weak definitions, see Brubaker and Cooper 2000.
26. The former possibility has been emphasized by Gilroy (1997: 328) and by
Natan Sznaider in his opening remarks to the conference Diaspora Today. The
latter possibility has been noted by Anthias 1998: 560, 563, 567.
27. Bhabha’s remark, in the context of a discussion of Salman Rushdie’s Satanic
Verses, is quoted in Tambiah 2000: 178.
28. For a very different argument criticizing the use of diaspora as an analytical
category in the study of immigration, see Soysal 2000. For an argument about
categories of analysis and categories of practice in the study of ethnicity, race,
and nation, see Brubaker 2002.
29. Writing on the African diaspora, Patterson and Kelley (2000: 19) observe that
“the presumption that black people worldwide share a common culture was
not . . . the result of poor scholarship. It responded to a political imperative—
one that led to the formation of political and cultural movements premised on
international solidarity.” They quote Hall’s (1990: 224) remark that unitary
images of diaspora offered “a way of imposing an imaginary coherence on the
experience of dispersal and fragmentation.”
30. On the changing historical stances of sending states toward immigrant popu-
lations and their descendants, see, for example, R. Smith 2003 (on Mexico,
Italy, and Poland), Gabaccia 2000 (on Italy), Itzigsohn 2000 (on the Domini-
can Republic, Haiti, and El Salvador), and Wang 1993 (on China).
31. There is no reason to expect that people will respond consistently to claims
made in their name by political entrepreneurs and organizations in the puta-
tive diaspora itself or in the putative homeland. They may well embrace dia-
sporic claims and projects at some moments or in some contexts, yet distance
themselves from such claims and projects in other contexts.
10. Even where self-government is not (or not fully) recognized, it can be claimed
and exercised by sub-state polities; see Cornell 2014 on the practice of self-
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12. The discussion of the German and Korean cases draws on Brubaker and Kim
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Index
categorical alignment, 57–58, 59–60, 68, global inequality and, 12, 19–21, 45,
72–73, 84, 165n19 159n11, 159n14
See also categories as inherited property, 159n14
categorical inequality, 2, 11–18, 36–37, politics of, 95, 132–144
39–41, 43–47, 163n50 segmentary organization and,
citizenship and, 12, 19–22, 45, 159n11, 19–20, 22
159nn13–14 See also politics of belonging
ethnicity and, 15–18, 31–32 classification
gender and, 13–14, 18, 22–29 as constitutive of race and ethnicity, 3,
law and, 11, 13–14, 18, 19–21, 22, 26, 13–14, 31–32, 48–49, 81, 83, 164n4
28, 36, 44 internalization of dominant schemes of,
limits of, 45–47 38–39, 43
networks and, 15–17, 158n7 See also categories; categorization
race and, 13–14, 16, 17, 28–32, 163n50 Clifford, James, 121
religion and, 33, 90, 96–97 confessionalization, and nationalism,
See also categories; inequality 107–109, 174n10
categories Cornell, Stephen, 88
analytical and practical, 179n3 culture, politicization of, 105, 107–108,
in biomedical research, 55–61 114–115, 132–133, 149, 174n7,
boundaries of, 83, 171n70 175n13
citizenship, 19–22
in forensic DNA phenotyping, 63–66 deep belonging, 79
gender, 13–14, 25–29, 36, 55–56 Deutsch, Karl, 148–149
inequality and, 2, 10–47 passim diaspora, 7–8
internal and external, 12–15, 158n2 boundary maintenance and, 123–125,
marked and unmarked, 43, 66, 79 129
networks and, 15–17, 158n7 as a category of practice, 129–130
organizational, 12–15, 17, 39–41, as claim or stance, 128–130
44, 45 dispersion in space and, 122–123
racial and ethnic, 13–14, 31–32, 35, 36, as entity, 128–130
48–49, 52–53, 55–61, 64–66, 68–69, homeland and, 123, 177n16
81–84 meanings of, 119–125, 128–130
See also categorical alignment; categorical second-order, 177n16
inequality; categorization; classification differentiation, 4, 44, 117–118, 159n10
categorization, 10, 18, 38–39, 43 horizontal and vertical, 10
as constitutive of race and ethnicity, 3, diffusion, 8, 152
13–14, 31–32, 48, 49, 81, 83, 164n4 discrimination, 26, 28, 32, 33, 36, 37, 38,
gender and, 25–26, 28–29 44, 133
formal and informal, 21, 134 by citizenship, 45
internal and external moments of, 26–27, costs of, 27, 160n24, 162n39
31–32, 124 formal and informal, 33
See also categories; classification opportunity for, 160n24
Catholicism, 106, 108 by race, 28, 29, 30, 31, 161n28
Chomsky, Noam, 172n5 by religion, 33
Christianity, 90, 92, 114 by sex, 23, 28, 160n16, 160n24,
nationalization of, 112–113 162n37
origins of nationalism and, 106–109 DNA databases, 61–63, 166n29
citizenship DNA phenotyping, 63–66, 167nn35–36
categorical inequality and, 12, 19–22, 25, Dufoix, Stéphane, 120
26, 27, 45, 159n11, 159nn13–14
culturalization of, 139 education
formal and substantive, 133–134 inequality and, 24–25, 29, 32–33, 35, 38,
global diffusion of, 8–9, 152–154 40, 43, 161nn29–30
i n de x 215
mixedness, 4, 54, 73–74, 78, 79, 170n63, as model for membership, 32, 117,
171n70 131–133, 136–140, 143–144,
modernity 152–154
basic categories of political understanding as model of membership, 117, 127,
and, 8, 152–154 131–133
multiple, 8–9, 145–147, 151–154 modernization theory and, 116–117,
nationalism and, 8–9, 148–154 145, 148–151
politicized ethnicity and, 148–154 putative obsolescence of, 7, 126–127,
secularization and, 4, 90–91, 97, 142–143
116–118 varieties of, 127, 131, 178n1
modernization theory, 116–117, See also nationalism
145–152 networks
See also modernity ancestry testing and, 167n38
categories and, 15–17
national integration, and modernization social closure and, 15–17, 158n7
theory, 145, 148–151 social separation and, 34
See also nationalism; nation-state
nationalism opportunity hoarding, 15–18
adaptability of, 9, 152–154 See also social closure
American, 110–111
as analogous to religion, 103–106 Parsons, Talcott, 149
cultural homogenization and, 108, personalized medicine, 54, 60–61
175n13 Piketty, Thomas, 2
deterritorialized, 115–116 pluralism. See legal pluralism; linguistic
as discourse, 110–112, 152–154 pluralism; religious pluralism
distinctively religious form of, politics of belonging, 7–8, 74–81,
113–116 132–144
global diffusion of, 8–9, 152–154 external and internal, 134–142
as intertwined with religion, 109–114, formal and informal, 134
118 legacies of empire and, 138,
Islamist movements and, 114–116 141–142
language and, 86–88, 98–99 migration and, 136, 138–140
methodological, 125 nation-state and, 7–8
modernity and, 8–9, 145, 148–154 as politics of identity, 74
ontology of, 116, 117–118 as politics of interest, 74–77
population genetics and, 78–80 social closure and, 133–134
religion and, 5, 6, 86–88, 102–118, primordialism, 84, 150
174n10 Protestantism, and nationalism, 107,
as a religion, 6, 103–104, 173n2 174n10
religious origins of, 106–109, 174n9
secularization and, 6, 116–118 race
transborder, 7–8, 140–144 ancestry testing and, 69–74
transnational religion and, 114–116 in biomedical research, 52–54, 55–61,
See also nation-state 82–83
nation-state, 95, 112, 115 categorical inequality and, 13–14, 16, 17,
as bounded space of mobility, 132, 28–32, 163n50
136, 137 class and, 30, 161n30
control over migration and, 7, 20, commonsense understandings of, 3–4,
126–127, 159n11, 159n13 49–51, 52–53, 54, 68–69, 72–74, 84,
diffusion of, 152–154, 178n1 150
and global inequality, 19–21, 45 as constituted by classification and
as key locus of belonging, 7, 133, categorization, 3, 13–14, 31–32,
143 48–49, 81, 83
218 i n de x
stigma, 32, 33, 35, 38–39, 42–43, 46, Van Parijs, Philippe, 93
159n13, 177n16
genetic variants and, 69, 165n23, 167n37 Wacquant, Loic, 30
race and, 30, 40, 69, 165n23, 167n37, Waldinger, Roger, 120
169n56 Weber, Max, 15, 109, 111, 152, 164n4,
172n5
Tilly, Charles, 11–18, 20, 41, 43–47 Wilson, Woodrow, 110
transnationalism, 7, 124, 126–127, 140,
142–144 Zolberg, Artiside, 85